


like the rifle

by diasterisms



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, And They All End Up Banging, Ben Is A Useless Himbo But It’s A Good Thing Everyone Else Is Moronsexual, Child Soldiers, Death of supporting characters, Dystopia, F/F, F/M, Foursome - F/F/M/M, Gore, Grimdark With A Happy Ending, Horror, Kylo And Ben Are Clones And Rey And Kira (Dark Rey) Are Also Clones, M/M, Multi, Non-Graphic References To Past Sexual Encounters Between Characters Under 18, Polyamory, Post-Nuclear War, Pseudo-Incest, Self-cest, That's it that's the plot, Threesome - F/F/M, Threesome - F/M/M, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:21:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28845996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diasterisms/pseuds/diasterisms
Summary: Take what you can get. Save what you can keep. Love what you can't kill.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 281
Kudos: 557





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the apocalypse fic that I promised my [Twitter](https://twitter.com/kylorenvevo) and [Tumblr](https://kylorenvevo.tumblr.com/) followers early last year! I've been slowly but steadily chipping away at it since then and, as a result, this story is complete and it will be updated every Monday night in Eastern Standard Time.
> 
> It's somewhat grittier than my usual fare owing to the nature of the genre; as such, please mind the tags and don't hesitate to opt out if anything is triggering or uncomfortable for you. For those who wish to give it a shot, though, rest assured that it will have as happy an ending as is possible in this 'verse.
> 
> Thanks in advance for reading! Comments would be much appreciated!

**_19 Thermidor_ **

**_210 years After Nuclear Winter_ **

There is a girl in a tower. This is not the beginning of events, but it is how the story starts. It could be a fairytale or a tragedy, or perhaps even both— not so outlandish a concept in a world where the dead come back to life.

Time is the first thing to be taken away. The girl remembers days of higher roofs and no roofs at all. Days of sunlight, fresh air soaking through her pores, vast expanses of ground on which she could stretch her legs.

And there was someone whose husky voice could slide into her bones, whose rare smile could unfurl like wings…

But he is gone now. Within the tower’s curved confines, he has taken on the vague and bittersweet quality of a dream, like all her other memories. Although it can’t have been that long, she feels as if she has been in here all her eighteen years, the facts of her past life existing only when she closes her eyes.

These are the things that are hers: a table, a bed. A board game, squares of dark green and faded white, wooden figures softened to the touch by age. The hum of radar screens. Voices on the radio. Thick panels of window-glass offering a view of black sea, gray sky, bitter earth. And sometimes, when she can stay awake long enough, the prickle of stars, skeins of moonlight gilding the cold stone floors in shadowed radiance.

How do these tales usually go? Is the girl in the tower a lost princess or some changeling child, awaiting rescue, awaiting someone to climb stairs of gold? Where is the witch, the dragon, the wall of thorns, the mirror?

They do not exist. The girl in the tower is only a girl. She is only me. Rey. I am a nothing, not a princess. I am not even wholly myself, for there is someone out there who is like me, who is me, wherever she is now. I wait for no one. And this is not the story you wanted, but it is the only story I know.

* * *

**_4 Brumaire_ **

**_207 ANW_ **

**_Three years earlier_ **

I flinch from the recoil. The acrid tang of sulfur coats my nostrils. My eyes water in the smoke-stained air of the monastery courtyard, which reverberates with echoes of gunfire.

This is how you kill a zombie: you aim for the head and you pull the trigger. Hand-to-hand combat is not advisable. One scratch, one bite, and you become one of them. One scratch, one bite, and you might as well turn the gun on yourself.

This is what the nuns taught us.

Sister Maz walks over to me, hands folded over the black-clothed curve of her stomach. She singles me out from the line of silent recruits.

“Rey.” She clucks her tongue. “You missed.”

My back aches from the effort of being kept straight. This is the correct position: shoulders squared, spine rigid, chin high. Even the slightest slump can mean penance in the form of a hundred pushups. The nuns are ruthless; they are training us to become soldiers, after all.

“How to sight-in was one of the first lessons,” she continues with a frown.

I don’t say anything. I don’t want to explain that I sometimes still have difficulty taking aim. Sister Maz is a legend; when she was a young novice, she fought her way through the Valley of the Dead armed only with a chainsaw and a machete. She would scoff at my weakness.

I watch her dark eyes slide over to Kira, my mirror image, my sister who is not my sister, standing stoically a few feet away, staring straight ahead. Kira’s posture is perfect and she never misses. I am seized by the fear that Sister Maz will make some sort of unflattering comparison.

I am spared this fate by the alarms.

A dozen sirens nestled deep within the building go off, their insistent wails slicing through the placidity of this cool September morning. There is a ripple in the line as several orphans shift uneasily, although it is soon quelled by Sister Maz’s beady glare.

“All right, you lot!” she barks over the keening noise. “Bomb shelters, now! And if I catch any of you breaking formation, you’ll be mopping floors for a year!”

“What crawled up her ass and died?” Finn, the boy next to me, mutters as we shoulder our Crusader M-XII rifles in unison.

“No idea, but it’s probably zombified, too,” I quip.

He makes a face. “Interesting visual. Thanks, Rey.”

We march out of the courtyard. I wonder which country is poised to attack. Malian, Ponemah, or Ogem? These are the enemies of Jakku. Technically, the zombies should be our common foe, but instead of motivating us to form alliances, they are the main reason we are at war with one another, struggling for dominion over the Western Reaches.

I lost my family in a Ponemah offensive when I was a baby. They couldn’t get to the shelters fast enough. A platoon of Jakku soldiers found me in the rubble before the bodies around me could turn and they took me back to base. The onsite techs extracted my DNA and grew Kira in a lab, and when she was four years old and I was five we were sent to Sister Maz.

Under Jakku law, all orphans belong to the military, to be cloned as compensation for the low birth rate, to be fodder in a never-ending war. Our Lady of Mercy is a monastery, an orphanage, a school, and a training camp. We wake up at the crack of dawn every day and slip into routines of classroom and battlefield. We do drills and sums and combat simulations. We are taught how to fight and how to survive.

*

It’s pitch-black inside my assigned shelter. Finn, who is this week’s monitor for our batch, forgot to grab the lamp on his way in. We all berate him for shirking this responsibility.

“I can’t go back for it _now,”_ he protests. “An air raid’s underway. I’d be toast.”

“You’re toast in here anyway,” threatens a sulky voice that I recognize to be mine, to be Kira’s. “I could kill you and make it look like an accident.”

“You’d be doing him a favor,” opines a serene drawl to my left. Poe. “Maz’s going to be pissed.”

_“You forgot the lamp?”_ Rose shrieks in an uncannily accurate parody of Sister Maz’s clipped, brusque diction. _“You will peel potatoes for the rest of your life!”_

We giggle in the darkness.

However, merriment soon fades into apprehension when the walls begin to shake. Outside, the wind’s savage howl is punctuated by crashes that could either be bombs raining over the monastery or the monastery itself crumbling down. Air raids are a fact of life in Jakku, but I still can’t get past the fear that knots my throat. The dread that the shelter won’t be strong enough and we’ll all die underneath its ruins.

In the absence of light, I have to operate by the senses that don’t require it. I feel arms and elbows grazing my sides, thighs brushing up against mine. I smell soap and warm skin and sweat. I hear the rise and fall of the other kids’ erratic breaths, and, underneath, the quick, pounding rhythm of my own pulse. I am fifteen years old and scared.

Someone erupts into a coughing fit. I frown because I recognize that sound. I’ve had to live with it for almost a month now.

“Marie, you really should get that looked at,” I say.

“I’m fine,” my roommate, Rose’s clone, whispers hoarsely. “It’s just a cold.”

“Colds don’t last several weeks,” I mumble.

“I’m surprised _you_ haven’t caught the bug yet, Rey,” Poe remarks. “Stealing snacks from the pantry in between meals must have really built up your constitution.”

Finn snickers. “You’d think she could’ve spent all that time eating learning how to shoot instead.”

“Shut the fuck up,” I grouse good-naturedly.

This is how we pass time during the storms. We take digs at one another. We tell jokes. We laugh because we still can. There is relief in our mirth. We are children of war, and we have learned to be grateful for small mercies.

*

When the sirens die down and it is deemed safe to go out, we troop back to the courtyard to inspect the damage.

“Oh,” Marie says softly.

The statue of the Mother has toppled from its place of honor in the center of the courtyard. She used to be almost twenty feet tall, keeping us perpetually in her shadow; now she lies scattered on the ground, too old to withstand this latest offensive, too tired to continue watching over us, almost unrecognizable until I get close enough to spot the wreckage of her benign half-smile, the pieces of her outstretched hands.

Finn shrugs. “Could’ve been worse. At least the roof didn’t cave in.”

Despite his words, his tone is mournful, his dour expression mirroring everyone else’s. I feel like we’ve just lost a friend. I’m not religious— the nuns are too busy preparing us for combat to devote much time to catechism— but in my own small way I believed in the Mother, if only because she had always been there. Unlike the younger, more superstitious kids, I didn’t think she kept us safe from the outside world, but I believed that I would always see her when I exited the main doors or looked out my window. That was all the religion I needed. The only faith that life could give me.

But if war has taught me anything, it’s that everything can change in the blink of an eye. There’s no use holding on to what you can no longer have.

And so, when Sister Maz assigns our batch to clean-up duty, I pitch in without a second thought. I sweep away the dust, I push the larger pieces of the statue to the side. I hold the remnants of the Mother in my hands. I take a deep breath, and I let her go.

*

Poe sits on an overturned half of the stone torso, leaning his back against the wall as he massages a cramp in his right leg. During the course of our labor, the afternoon shadows have lengthened; it’s nearly six in the evening and the first stars glimmer faintly above us.

“Quite a storm.” Poe gestures to the remains of the statue with his free hand.

“It could’ve been worse,” I say, echoing Finn’s statement.

“Yeah, that’s it, isn’t it?” Poe muses. “It can always be worse. The shit we tell ourselves…” He shakes his head, glaring moodily into the distance.

My arms are heavy with exhaustion and my stomach throbs with hunger. The others must feel the same way, too, because someone calls out to Poe, asking him to sing something to make the work go faster. Poe is the self-appointed keeper of old songs; he likes to shut himself up in the archive room and listen to ancient recordings that the nuns have managed to save.

He looks at me. “Any requests?”

“I don’t know much about music,” I admit. My interest in the archive room has so far been limited to its library.

From his perch, Poe studies the scene in the courtyard through hooded eyes. He cracks a grin at the sight of Finn and Kira wrestling with the Mother’s forehead, arguing about which direction to heave it in. The grin is sardonic, but Poe’s voice, when he starts to sing, is not. It’s golden and sincere and carries through the air, shaping lyrics that must be a thousand years old.

_“When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me…”_

Someone else’s words, given life in this dusk. In response, the other kids’ steps lighten, their bodies relaxing, newly reassured by the prospect of food and rest after the task is done. Poe taps the rhythm with his fingers and I close my eyes, letting his song wash over me.

The war takes everything, it’s true, but perhaps I can have this moment. Perhaps I can keep it with me always.

*

“Is that… _blood?”_

I look up from my plateful of rice and beef stew at the sound of Kira’s aghast tone. She’s staring at the handkerchief crumpled in Marie’s fist, the white cloth streaked with red.

Marie hurriedly shoves the offending article into her pocket. “It’s nothing,” she murmurs, lowering her eyes.

Her cheeks are flushed and she’s breathing heavily. Frowning, I raise the back of my hand to her forehead. Hot skin burns my knuckles.

“You’ve got a fever,” I say. “Definitely time to see the nurse.”

“I’m all right,” she protests. “It’s a little warm today, that’s all.”

“It’s the middle of autumn, Marie,” Rose points out. She pushes her plate away and stands up, holding one hand out to her mirror image. “Come on, I’ll walk you to the infirmary.”

_“No!”_ Marie bursts out with such vehemence that her voice carries over the lunchtime din in the cafeteria. Heads turn in the direction of our table.

“No,” she repeats, more quietly this time. “I… I can’t go through that. Not again. Don’t make me. Please.”

We all know what she’s afraid of. Medical supplies are hard to come by, and the monastery hasn’t received a new shipment in months. When people fall ill, they’re usually locked up in the sickroom with a nun at their bedside, waiting for them to recover, or waiting to decapitate them once they’ve breathed their last, so that they don’t Turn. It’s called the Vigil, and Marie, who has always been frail compared to the rest of us, who’d been this close to being marked a failed duplicate due to how sickly she is, has already experienced it four times in her life. She told me once that all her nightmares involve the infirmary and a nun wielding an axe.

“Okay,” Rose finally says, sitting back down. “Okay.”

We resume eating, but a pall has been cast over our meal. We pick at our food and avoid one another’s eyes.

Finn soon breaks the tension by clearing his throat. “Someone say something funny,” he orders through a mouthful of carrots and potatoes. “Awkward silence is bad for the digestion, you know.”

“I guess we _could_ talk about how you puked in the training shuttle this morning,” Kira suggests snidely.

The rest of us snort. Even Marie manages a feeble smile.

“Not all of us can be an ace,” Finn retorts. “I was _not_ prepared for that barrel roll.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t prepared for the smell…”

As Finn and Kira bicker, with Poe and Rose throwing in the occasional caustic remark for good measure, Marie coughs again. A drop of blood spatters on my wrist, unnoticed by everyone except the two of us.

She grimaces. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I assure her.

I drag my wrist against my thigh, wiping the blood off on my pant leg, but what I can’t erase is the feeling of foreboding that passes through me like a chill.

*

That night, I’m jolted out of sleep by horrible groans coming from the bed opposite mine. After several moments of fumbling in the dark, I manage to locate the matches and light the candle on my desk. I peer at Marie’s mattress in the flickering golden glow. She tosses and writhes under her blanket, all the while making unintelligible gurgling noises that send a shiver down my spine.

At first, I think she’s having another bad dream. I move forward to wake her up, but as I near her bed, she slowly lurches into a sitting position. The blanket slides off, revealing her face.

I scream.

Marie died and Turned sometime during the night. Her skin is pale and her eyes are clouded over— grey, flat, and empty. Her cracked, colorless lips stretch to bare her teeth. She reaches out for me with no sign of recognition whatsoever; she is drawn only to my warmth and my flesh.

I’ve never encountered a zombie up close before. The shock of seeing my roommate as one now roots me to the spot. My mind reels with terror and anguish.

“What happened?” a sleepy voice demands. “I heard someone shout. Is everything— _holy fuck!”_

Kira stands frozen in the doorway, one hand curled around the knob, the other one on her hip. She stares at the scene and I think about how utterly identical she and I must look now, our mouths parted in disbelief.

Zombies slow down as their bodies decay; the freshly-Turned are the swiftest. The thing that used to be Marie crawls out of bed, and it is the startling speed of this movement that jerks me out of my paralysis. I whirl around and I run.

“Come _on!”_ I yell, grabbing Kira’s elbow. We race down a hallway ablaze with torches, followed by Marie, whose moans fill the air.

Each level of the orphanage has its own weapons gallery in case of emergency situations, a small storage area furnished with guns, ammunition, axes, and knives in glass compartments. Once the glass is breached, the sensors will go off, alerting everyone in the building.

Kira and I throw ourselves into the gallery and fling open the lids. As alarms buzz in the background, we load matching B-412 Assault Interceptors.

I’ve done this so many times over the years that, by now, the motions are muscle memory, more instinct than conscious action. Cock the charging handle. Ride the bolt forward. Insert the magazine. A series of sharp clicks and metallic rustles that I can breeze through in my sleep.

What I can’t do, though, is shoot.

When Kira and I spill back out into the hallway, Marie staggers towards us. We fire. But hitting a moving zombie is much harder than hitting a cardboard target. Our bullets bounce uselessly against the walls, graze her shoulders and her legs.

_Aim for the head, aim for the head,_ I chant to myself like a mantra, but to my eyes she is just an ever-moving blur at the far end of the corridor. I can’t see. I can’t sight.

Almost before I’m aware of it, she gains a final burst of speed and charges. She forces me into a corner, and I am looking into the eyes of the thing that used to be Marie, I am looking at the face of my death, only inches away. The gun is in my hands but I’m strangely immobile. I grew up with this girl, and she is about to kill me, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to—

_Live._ The word sears through my brain as Marie opens her mouth wide, ready to sink her teeth into my neck. _Live._

_I have to live._

I wedge the B-412 between us, digging its barrel into her forehead. I bite down on my lip so hard it bleeds. I pull the trigger.

At this close range, everyone is a perfect shot.

Marie slumps against me. My knees buckle. We slide to the floor together, her and I. I hear the clatter of footsteps and voices raised in panic, but they seem so far away.

I’m covered in blood, in shards of skull. Through the viscous mist, I see the faces of the other recruits and the nuns, wan and dumbfounded, cloaked in patterns of torchlight and shadow. They’re brought up short at the sight of me beneath Marie’s remains, and the world falls into stillness and silence.

Rose is screaming. It must be especially gruesome to see your mirror image undead with the skull blown out. It must be like looking into your future.

At last, Finn takes a hesitant step forward. He says my name in what sounds like wonder.

This is how I kill my first zombie.

*

We bury Marie in the backyard, under a misty sky laced with the rose-tinted flush of dawn. A simple shroud is draped over her mutilated body before the nuns lower her into the hole in the ground that Rose and Finn and Poe insisted on digging themselves.

Sister Alin presides over the ceremony. Because the deceased Turned, she does what is proper and reads aloud the story of Lazarus from the Bible with her remaining eye. She lost the other one in battle two decades ago, holding back Malian’s ground invasion of Carbon Ridge; the space that it used to occupy is now covered by a black patch.

Her monologue is threaded through with sniffles from the crowd. All around me, the other recruits are pale-faced and teary-eyed. This is not the first funeral we’ve attended, as the backyard strewn with crosses can attest, but those graves belong to nuns and orphans who had somebody by their deathbeds, ready to cut their heads off before they could Turn. This is the first time we have lost one of our own to the undead plague.

Also present in the crowd are Dayo and Isa, who are Finn’s and Poe’s clones, respectively. They stand apart from my group, in their own little social cluster. Most of the recruits don’t tend to bond with their clones and vice versa; I suppose that it could be the strangeness of it, and perhaps there is animosity to be elicited from frequently being reminded that you’re not the only one.

Marie and Rose had been an exception to that unspoken rule; Kira and I, another. But sometimes I think that mine and Kira’s constant close proximity to each other is on sufferance, that we were forced into being friends because we individually struck up a camaraderie with the same set of people.

I’m the subject of tense and pitying glances, as if everyone else who is at Marie’s funeral is waiting for me to collapse. I won’t give them the satisfaction. My eyes are dry. Numbness radiates from the pit of my stomach, consuming my entire being until my limbs feel weightless. I don’t care. It’s better than crying. I promised myself a long time ago that the war would not break me.

_“He said, ‘Lazarus, come out!’”_ intones Sister Alin, somber and fierce in her black habit and black eye-patch, in the pearly light of the rising sun. _“He said, ‘Take off the grave clothes and let him go.’”_

*

The day progresses as per usual, because Sister Maz refuses to grant us time to mourn.

“Soldiers don’t grieve their fallen comrades,” she says after the funeral. “Otherwise, they’d never be stopping.”

I look at her face then, with its tangled pattern of scars and its unyielding expression, and I wonder how many people she has lost.

During lunch break, Finn, Kira, Poe, Rose, and I take the stairwell up to the monastery rooftop, which doubles as a helicopter landing pad. We sit in a row at the very edge, our legs dangling in the air, and we gaze down at the backyard that now houses Marie’s cross.

“You were going to do it sooner or later, you know,” Finn tells me. “If not her, it would’ve been someone else, somewhere down the line.”

“Why didn’t she go to the infirmary?” Kira mutters.

“And then what?” counters Finn. “Her fifth Vigil?”

“Well, that _would_ have been better,” Kira insists. “One of the sisters cutting off her head before she could Turn— that’s a _good_ death. Not… not what happened last night.”

There is anger in her voice, but also a subtle relief. I know what she’s thinking: _At least it wasn’t me._ Kira didn’t make the kill shot; she didn’t hold someone else’s life in her hands and decide to end it. That burden is mine to bear.

My pulse quickens with some vague resentment. She looks like me, she _is_ me, in a fashion, but I am the only one who must live with this.

“I think Marie was afraid that she wasn’t going to make it this time,” says Poe. “I think she didn’t want to spend her final days in the sickroom with only a nun for company.”

“Who could blame her?” Finn chimes in. “What if Maz had been the one keeping Vigil? Imagine _that_ ugly mug being the last thing you ever see.”

Poe grimaces. “I’d rather zombify.”

“You’re terrible, both of you,” snarls Kira. She glances at Rose and the boys follow her gaze and fall silent. Guilty.

But Rose gives me a gentle nudge. “Marie’s illness killed her before you pulled the trigger,” she says. “She was already dead. You just carried the bullet for a while.”

Rose smells like the soil she dug up for Marie’s grave and the tears she shed doing it. I don’t look at her but I rest my head on her shoulder. Kira fiddles with the ends of my hair, twisting the strands between fingers identical to mine in a rare gesture of comfort. Finn and Poe flash me strained yet determined grins.

I close my eyes. I breathe in earth and salt. Just the five of us, at this great height, clustered together on the ledge like a flock of birds gone home to roost, silhouetted against the sky. Just us with sunlight on our backs and stone beneath our palms, trying to stay forever in this moment, trying not to think about all the days to come. I never want to go back down.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for giving this story such a warm welcome! I hope that this second chapter doesn't disappoint!

**_6 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

“Incoming.” Kylo gestures to a red blip on the radar screen that monitors activity over Burke’s Trailing.

I squint at the dashboard beyond the broad curve of his shoulder. “Big one,” I remark.

“They must be reallyupset about Sahbrontee.”

“I would be, too, if I were in their shoes.” Sahbrontee is Malian’s capital city, the jewel of its empire. Or, at least, it was. Destroyers from Jakku and a few other allied nations leveled it last week.

I grab the transceiver from the overhead compartment and punch in a string of codes, tapping into Liszt, our pet name for the radio frequency used exclusively by Jakku’s armed forces.

“Kelvin Watchtower to Niima High Command,” I announce. “We’ve got a hot one. Breach in…” I pause, watching expectantly as Kylo scribbles calculations on a notepad. He then mouths _Seven_ at me, holding up the corresponding number of fingers.

I raise an eyebrow in surprise, but I relay the information anyway. “Seven minutes,” I finish.

There’s a brief crackle of static. A doubtful voice asks, **_“Kelvin, are you sure?”_**

“Affirmative,” I reply, because I figured out a long time ago that Kylo is something of a genius. If he says that the destroyer will enter Jakku airspace in seven minutes, it’s going to enter Jakku airspace in seven minutes.

My job done, I sign off. “How can it be going so fast?” I demand. Usually, offensives from Malian show up on radar a full half hour before crashing into Jakku coastlines.

“I have no idea.” Kylo spins on his chair, swiveling away from the screens and resting his back against the dashboard. “But it’s your turn to make tea.”

I gape at him. “We’re dealing with a new type of freakish superfast destroyer, and you… want tea.”

He shrugs. “Sure.”

I sigh as I walk over to the makeshift kitchen at the back of the tower room. When we started working together as sentries, Kylo was as jumpy as I still am, but two years of daily monotony in our cramped outpost on Kelvin Ridge have rendered him utterly blasé. He’d rather be up in the air, flying one of those fighter jets, but the occasional muscle spasms that twitch through his right hand disqualify him from active combat, just as my abysmal marksmanship does.

I’ve just put the kettle on to boil when the transceiver spurts to life again.

“Yes?” Kylo drawls into the mouthpiece.

**_“Niima High Command to Kelvin Watchtower. Heads up,”_ ** is the ominous declaration. **_“It’s coming your way.”_**

_What?_

I douse the fire and rush to check the dashboard, which confirms High Command’s words in a clinical display of coordinates.

**_“Unable to send reinforcements,”_ ** the voice continues. **_“Brace yourselves.”_**

Through the laminated glass windows of mine and Kylo’s tower, I can already see a vast silhouette looming up from the gray clouds on the horizon, just beyond the barren fields dotted with shambling zombies and the oil-black waters of Burke’s Trailing tossing up their greasy waves.

I know why High Command can’t help us in time. The destroyer is moving too fast, and they need to concentrate defenses on Namenthe’s Crater— the vast collection of cities shielded by Kelvin Ridge.

It still annoys me, though. I’ve never been given to heroics.

I hit the button that activates the breaker shields around the tower. Kylo and I then pile into the elevator, which takes us straight to the basement. We don’t speak the whole ride down, although I glimpse the tense set of his pale jaw in the dim light.

Part of being a sentry means accepting the fact that it’s a dangerous job and, compared to the rest of the country, you are dispensable. In Jakku, there’s no shortage of people signing up for the military; it’s one of the few lucrative industries left. And since manning the watchtowers is one of the few positions that don’t require a hundred percent physical fitness, there are always dozens of volunteers eager to replace those killed in the line of duty. As sentries, we are simply not treated with as much importance as, say, pilots and infantrymen.

Kylo is bitter about this.

He wasn’t actually born— or created, perhaps— in Jakku. He is from Chandrila, one of Jakku’s former allies. I say “former” because it _was_ a nation— one of the Core nations, in fact. The zombies overran it twenty years ago and survivors fled to whichever countries would accept them, in the Western Reaches and in the Mid Rim. Kylo had been eight years old when he and his father boarded a refugee ship; they ended up in the Goazon Badlands. We call it the Badlands because it is a ghost island separated from the rest of Jakku territory by Burke’s Trailing, peopled merely by a handful of scattered towns and ravenous hordes of undead. Kylo lived there for a decade and then he stowed away on another ship— a cargo freighter, this time— and signed up for the armed forces once he reached the Niima region.

I don’t know what happened to his father. I haven’t asked.

The elevator doors slide open, and Kylo and I step into stuffy underground air. I flick on the battery-operated lamp that I know from memory is by the entrance, and its harsh white light floods the dusty space. The basement is as small as the tower room, although not as crowded. It holds only a crate of food supplies, a first-aid kit, a urinal, and a chess board.

We sit on the floor. Kylo quietly assembles the game in the distance between our crossed legs, lining up pawns and high officials with quick, methodical precision. The wooden board is ancient and stained, and one of the knights is missing half his head, but it is a dear thing to us. It is one of our few distractions.

The alarm goes off. It’s a blocky triangular bulb installed into the wall that flashes red and makes a buzzing sound when a bombing’s underway. Triggered by sensors planted outside, it doesn’t stop until the attack’s over and it’s safe for us to take the elevator back up.

Chess is a game of concentration, and over the long months I have learned to play through the alarm’s noise. I push my pawn forward and wait for Kylo to make his move.

In the world above, Malian pilots are steering their destroyer into Jakku airspace, powered by massive turbines that conjure whirling gales that tear up the countryside along with the bombs that are dropped one after the other in quick succession. In the past, Kelvin Watchtower has proven solid enough, but today may well be the day that it falls, the day that Kylo and I will have to climb out through the underground tunnels and retreat to Namenthe’s Crater, leaving behind the ruins of our own little kingdom.

There are other fears as well. The swarms of zombies drifting through Kelvin Ridge might stumble across a weak spot in the tunnels and find their way into the tower. If that happens, it will be too late to radio for help. Kylo and I will be as good as dead. There is no exit aside from the tunnels, short of opening the roof hatch and jumping to the ground and breaking our necks.

I push these worries to the back of my mind as we continue playing. Being a soldier means living in the moment. You take what you can get in this war.

“Your move, Rey,” Kylo murmurs.

Chess is a game of sacrifice. I capture his knight and in response he captures my bishop. Together, we wait out the storm.

*

When I came of age at sixteen, I was immediately sworn into the military. Well… I could have been older or a little bit younger. No one knows my real birthday. The date on all my legal documents is the day I was found in the rubble and baptized into my second life.

It was no surprise when I failed the marksmanship exam. Sister Maz campaigned to get me a foreign liaisons post, but that’s a cushy job, coveted by affluent families for their sons and daughters. I was an orphan. I was nobody.

And so I was sent off to the sentry regiments.

I have lived with Kylo on the peaks of Kelvin Ridge for two years. When we first met, it was hate at first sight. Just sheer, unadulterated loathing. He was surly and snappish and far too blunt whenever he bothered talking to me, and we disagreed on so many matters. We still do, and he absolutely still is all of those things, but…

But the weeks passed and they became months, and the months turned into a year and then another. He taught me chess and I started brewing enough tea for two. We fell into it, and sometimes I feel as though it’s always been just us, locked away in this isolated tower. He is my only friend in this desolate, watchful life that I have been forced into. I am— or, at least, I _think_ I am— eighteen, and he is older, and sometimes it feels like war and loneliness are all that we have ever known.

*

“There’s a crack in the window,” I tell Kylo up in the tower room after the destroyer has left.

“Supply drop tomorrow morning,” he says, glancing at the schedule tacked to the wall. “I’ll put in a request for a repair team as well.”

“Don’t forget to ask for more battery packs. Our power core’s running low.”

He snaps a mock salute. The corners of his lips tilt into a lazy smirk. “Sir, yes, sir!”

I roll my eyes at him as I plop down on one of the two swivel chairs stationed at the dashboard. “Very funny.”

This is what’s inside the tower room: the two swivel chairs, the dashboard full of buttons and levers and radar screens, the kitchen, a bathroom, two closets, and two beds. Kylo and I have not set foot out of the tower since we first arrived. Because we got here through the underground tunnels, I don’t even know what Kelvin Watchtower looks like on the outside, although I assume it resembles every other sentry outpost in Jakku: a hulking monolith assembled from stone and metal. During air raids, the breaker shields unfurl and spread out like wings, and the towers look like giant angels on the mountaintops, watching over the land.

The dashboard occupies an entire side of the square room. Directly above it are the windows, large panels of thick storm-resistant glass looking out to sea. In the time before, the windows would have offered a panoramic view of lush green forests that slope into pale sand beaches and shimmering blue waters. At least, this is what I like to imagine. Our history books say that the country had once been beautiful.

Now, a couple of centuries after mankind emerged from the underground bunkers of nuclear winter, the trees are withered, scraggly things, and the beaches are overrun with zombies. They mill about, bumping into one another, leaving shuffling tracks on the grimy sand. If I were to zoom in with binoculars, I’ll be able to see random limbs and maybe even a few heads scattered on the ground. Zombies have never learned to take cover during air raids; the explosions toss them around, tear them apart.

It doesn’t matter to them, though. They can’t feel pain.

“Have you ever killed one?” Kylo has sat down in the chair beside me, unnoticed until he spoke. He is also staring out the windows. It is one of the few occasions that he has brought up the past.

“Yeah,” I say. I think about Marie, not as she was in her last moments, but the Marie I had known, who couldn’t talk without moving her hands, who loved the smell of tamarinds, who I see sometimes, in my dreams, laughing at knock-knock jokes and making faces behind Sister Maz’s back. I suck in a deep breath, stifling the familiar pang of guilt, forcing the memories back to the recesses of my mind, where they cannot inflict their sting.

“What about you?” I ask Kylo, turning my head to look at him.

He doesn’t meet my gaze. I have always liked his eyes— they are the rich brown of brandy gilded with a hint of olive at the edges— but not when they are as cold and distant as they are now. His profile is sharp in the afternoon light. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat.

“Back then,” he replies at last. “In the Badlands.”

I don’t bother to pry. The look on his face and the tone of his voice tell me everything, because I wear the same scars. It was someone he had known.

“When will this be over?” I wonder out loud.

Kylo snorts. “Are you kidding me? It’s never going to end. War never ends.”

“You could try to sound a _little_ hopeful.”

He reaches out a hand to the glass, his fingers lightly tracing the spider-web shape of the crack. If the wind and the explosions had been just a little stronger, they might have completely shattered the window. How close had the tower come to being destroyed today? How close had we come to death? I shudder at the thought of it.

“Hope is for dreamers, Rey,” Kylo says. “Dreamers don’t tend to live very long in a world like this.”

*

Technically, Kylo and I should be on alternating shifts, one sleeping while the other mans the dashboard, to ensure that the radar screens are never left unmonitored. This is military protocol.

However, as I said, Kylo is something of a genius.

Last year, using a spare battery pack and an assortment of wires and cables, he rigged a standard-issue alarm clock to the dashboard sensors. He programmed the clock so that, if switched on, it would emit its characteristic shrill noise whenever the radars pick something up or there’s communication on the transceiver. Now both our schedules are in sync, which is a relief.

It’s a risk, of course, and I had my misgivings at the start, but I grew to admit that it was an improvement over the old routine. Sentry duty is mind-numbing work. Before the alarm clock, when it was my shift and I didn’t have anyone to talk to while Kylo snored softly on his bed, I felt like I was going mad.

To conserve the power core, we’ve made it a habit to go to bed while there’s still a bit of daylight left. But there are times— usually after an attack— when we can’t fall asleep right away, times when our bodies are restless, when we are acutely aware of the silence, when our brains clamor with memories of what we’ve lost and the possibility that tomorrow the zombies might come or the destroyers will blow us to pieces.

Today is one of those times. We deal with it the way we always do.

As the sun sets on the horizon, tinting Kelvin Ridge and the coastline and Burke’s Trailing in brilliant, fiery colors, Kylo slips into my bed. The springs shift under our combined weight. He moves on top of me, the sides of his elbows grazing the sides of my shoulders as he props himself up on the mattress. His pale skin has taken on an opalescence in the red-gold light, his muscles straining against the thin material of his sleeveless white undershirt. His lush dark hair falls into his brown eyes.

“I need to cut your hair again,” I absent-mindedly remark. “I’ll do a better job this time, I promise.”

He smirks. “Really? You want to talk about that _now?”_

I laugh. I cradle his face, my thumb tracing the scar that bisects his right cheek. I haven’t asked him about this, either. It is jagged and faded, an old wound that starts above his eyebrow and slashes diagonally down to his jaw. I often wonder how it came to be, but I’ve never been brave enough to ask. He holds his past to him like a hand of cards.

I curl my fingers around the dog tags hanging from the thin chain around his neck. I gently pull him down to me, and his lips press against mine. He tastes like toothpaste and he smells like soap. I wrap my arms around his neck and he deepens the kiss, rocking against me in a way that makes me gasp into his mouth.

We shed our garments, bit by bit. He nibbles at my collarbone and at the point where my ear meets my jaw and then he wanders lower, kissing his way down my body, lingering on my breasts for a little while. There are times when he likes to take his sweet time teasing them, sucking on my nipples until I’m crying from the overstimulation, but neither of us want to go slow today. Soon his head is between my legs and my spine is arching off of the thin mattress as he laps at my cunt, waiting until I’m squirming before he dips his tongue inside me.

Kylo is always generous when it comes to eating me out, although I suspect that it’s for his own benefit as well. I am not a small girl but I am too small for him; he has trouble getting his cock all the way inside me if I’m not sufficiently wet and relaxed. And he does so love to go all the way in.

I whine and I gasp and my hands fly to my chest. I pinch and tug at my nipples while he licks between my thighs, chasing more of this pleasure that I think can be so close to happiness. He peeks up at me through his lashes and he growls his approval against my cunt, the vibrations rippling through me like a thunderstorm. Then he seals those plush lips of his over my clit and he _sucks_ and I am unraveling with a sharp sob, just like that, into a million little pieces, and I am still coming when he rises up on his knees and hooks my legs over his shoulders and sheathes himself inside me.

“Too—” My breath hitches at the stretch, at the pressure that I’m never prepared for. “Too much— too big—”

“You’ll take it,” Kylo says in deep, quiet tones that leave no room for argument. He stares down at me with burning dark eyes and he fucks me through my aftershocks, hard and fast. It’s always hard and fast after a destroyer.

I writhe beneath him, folded practically in half by him. I keep my own eyes open as much as I can, because whenever I close them I see the crack in the window. _Make me forget,_ I entreat him silently. _Make me forget, like you always do. Make me forget the sirens and the hole in Marie’s head. Even just for a little while._

As if Kylo hears me, his movements become more urgent. He hunches over me, close enough to dig his teeth into my neck. The rigorous military training at Our Lady of Mercy has made me flexible, if nothing else. I cry out, tugging at his hair, relishing the pain. I am on fire and he covers me, the sun sinks into the sea and my heart races in tandem with his. As the stars wink into existence, there is nothing but warm skin and soft lips and breath in our lungs and blood in our veins. We are alive. So alive. We have survived another day.

*

The next morning, a harsh ringing sound jars us awake.

We quickly untangle ourselves from each other and put on our clothes. Kylo hurries to the dashboard, turning off the alarm clock as he passes it. The transceiver is crackling, signaling someone trying to establish a connection with us on Liszt. Kylo picks up.

**_“Mule 1 to Kelvin Watchtower,”_ ** announces a cheerful male voice. **_“We are making the scheduled supply drop. We are on the approach. Open wide, sweethearts.”_**

Someone else snickers in the background, mutters something that suspiciously sounds like, **_“That’s what she said.”_**

**_“Shouldn’t it be, ‘That’s what you told her’?”_ ** queries the first voice.

I can’t help but smile at the juvenile humor of the exchange. It reminds me of Finn and Poe’s conversations, back at Our Lady of Mercy. I haven’t seen or heard from them since we enlisted.

I pull a lever on the dashboard, and the roof hatch creaks open above our heads, flooding the tower room with the bright glare of day. I inhale deeply, savoring the rush of fresh air. Air from outside, air that hasn’t been recycled through the purifier vents time and time again until it possesses a stale tang.

The shadow of a helicopter falls on Kylo and me, and we step out of the way, the hum of rotor blades filling our ears. A huge crate of supplies is lowered into the room, suspended by ropes. Once it hits the floor with a dull thud, I grab a nearby knife and jump on top of the crate. I reach up as high as I can and cut the ropes, squinting against the hot sunlight. An arm emerges from the helicopter and waves at me. I grin back. How wonderful it is to see another human being. To be reminded that there still is life outside my tower.

The severed ropes drop to the floor, and I get off the crate.

“All clear,” Kylo says into the transceiver’s mouthpiece. He pushes the lever back up, closing the hatch.

**_“I’ve got the repair team here,”_ ** the pilot tells him. **_“What needs fixing?”_**

Kylo directs the helicopter to the windows. He and I watch silently as two crew members are dropped down to level with the crack, supported by rope ladders. They are both women, dressed in olive-and-brown fatigues, their hair secured in tight buns. I move closer so I can make out their faces. Part of me nurtures the fleeting, statistically illogical hope that I’ll recognize them from the orphanage, the only family that I have ever known.

But they are strangers to me. They give us crisp nods of acknowledgement, and then get to work, their brows furrowed in concentration. It is a precarious task, dangling in the air, patching up the crack with a variety of sealant sprays.

_You are the first women I’ve seen in two years,_ I want to tell them. I want to reach out and touch them. Touch someone new.

But I can’t. I am separated from them in the same way that I am separated from the rest of the world. By stone and metal, glass and duty.

* * *

**_14 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

The days pass, during which Kylo is moody and quiet, the way he usually is after a supply drop. Seeing the helicopter brings all his old desires to the surface, his unattainable dream of flight. He doesn’t like being reminded of the fact that there are other people in existence, the fact that he’d rather be out there, in the world, instead of being stuck in this tower with only me for company.

I wonder what his life was prior to joining the armed forces. If, like mine, it had been full of laughter and petty arguments and friends. I never ask, and he offers me the same courtesy. We have been in Kelvin for two years but we know merely bits and pieces of who each other was before. There is no need to bring up the past; it is gone.

However, one afternoon, I can’t resist the pull of curiosity. We are eating lunch in the kitchen when, all of a sudden, Kylo’s spoon clatters into his bowl, sending drops of mushy pea soup scattering everywhere.

I look up in surprise. He is scowling at his right hand. His fingers are trembling.

I tactfully remain silent until the muscle spasm fades away. He retrieves his spoon and continues eating as if nothing had occurred in the past few seconds.

“What happened to your hand?” I blurt out.

He directs his scowl to me. I keep my expression impassive, resolutely maintaining eye contact. Sometimes, when the perennial boredom drives us up the wall, we engage in staring contests. I am better at it than he is. I always win. He likes to justify that this is because my big eyes creep him out.

Finally, Kylo sighs, conceding defeat. “I punched through a glass door when I was ten,” he says in a stiff voice.

“Anger management issues much?”

“I was trapped,” he snarls. “It was the only way out.”

I don’t know how to respond. My first instinct is to apologize for my flippancy, but, knowing him, that will only make things worse. He hates being pitied.

“You’re lucky, Rey,” he continues. “You grew up in one of the monasteries. Safe within fortified walls, with the Sisters of the Apocalypse to guard you. Back in the Badlands, we were at the mercy of the undead. Only the strongest and the fastest could survive. If you so much as caught a fever, forget it. You were banished from the town before you could die and Turn. Some of us were even killed by soldiers. They often mistake people foraging in the woods for zombies. They shoot first and ask questions later. Can’t say I blame them. It’s safer that way.” He runs a frustrated hand through his hair. “It was like that in Chandrila, too. Towards the end.”

It’s strange how living in a war zone has yet to desensitize me to fresh horrors. I suppose I should be grateful that I can still feel, but it’s during moments like this one when I wish I were numb, when bitterness is threading through Kylo’s normally clipped intonations and his face carries the burden of memory.

I almost ask if that was the same day he’d gotten the scar on his face, if that old wound is from a shard of broken glass as well, but I decide that it would be pushing it. And because I am guilty, because I am sad for him, I decide to offer one of my secret stories. To trade a piece of my heart for his.

“My roommate at Our Lady of Mercy got sick when I was fifteen,” I tell him. “She died in the night, and she Turned. I had no choice.”

He passes me a speculative glance. The harsh line of his mouth softens.

“Neither did I,” he says.

*

Kylo takes a nap after lunch. I try to amuse myself at the dashboard, but there isn’t even the slightest hint of activity on the radar screens. They monitor only the airspace over the western and northern borders of Burke’s Trailing, so an offensive could sneak up from behind and catch us totally unaware.

It’s a stupid thought, because there are watchtowers on the other side of Niima as well, and the attack would have to go through them and then the various cities in Namenthe’s Crater. We’d be well forewarned before it could reach the Kelvin Ridge.

This, however, is what my mind does when it’s idle. It plays out catastrophic scenarios, no matter how unlikely they are; it invents different ways for me to die.

_Bang._

Something heavy slams into the roof with so much force that the tower room shakes. I raise my head, involuntarily clutching the edge of the dashboard for support. My pulse spikes with anxiety. Behind me, I hear faint muttering as Kylo stirs in his sleep. Over the long months, he has conditioned himself to wake up only for alarm clocks and sirens.

Before I can decide what to do, there’s a burst of static from the receiver. I pick up.

**_“Hello? Hello, can anyone hear me?”_ **

I almost drop the transceiver in shock. Instead of the stern bark of High Command, there is a scratchy male voice on the other end of the line.

“Yes, I can hear you,” I say into the mouthpiece. “This is Kelvin Watchtower. You are on Liszt, Station 23.”

There’s an audible exhalation of relief. ** _“Thank God! I tapped into the nearest frequency I could find. Listen, this is extremely embarrassing, but I’ve crash-landed on your roof, so—”_**

“You’ve _what?”_ I repeat, incredulous.

**_“Crash-landed. On your roof,”_ ** says the voice, more deliberately this time. It is starting to dawn on me that he sounds… _familiar_. I am so sure that I’ve heard this voice before, or at the very least someone else’s that closely resembles it. **_“Look,”_** he continues, **_“this communicator’s battery pack is running out, so if you would be so kind as to open the hatch…?”_**

“I— identification?” I stammer, still unable to come to terms with this weird event.

**_“Ben Organa,”_ ** he promptly replies. **_“Alderaanian special tactics liaison to the Jakku Stratocracy. My military service number is 987-65-4320.”_**

Alderaan. One of the most powerful nations in the Core, and halfway across the world from Kelvin Watchtower.

“I’ll have to clear this with High Command first,” I say. “I’ll get back to you.”

I place Ben on hold, but for some reason I can’t access the channel that will put me through to the High Command office. My attempt is met with dead silence.

I walk over to Kylo and poke him gently in the ribs.

“Rey?” His dark eyes flutter to half-mast, bleary and unfocused. “What is it?”

“Don’t look now,” I tell him wryly, “but there’s a man on our roof.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do mind the couple of new tags that I've belatedly added. I forgot to warn for these specific triggers until I was prepping this chapter for upload, and I sincerely apologize. As always, thank you so much for all the bookmarks, comments, and kudos thus far!

**_14 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

**_Later_ **

Over the hiss and crackle of Liszt, a grumpy, just-woken-up Kylo directs the erstwhile pilot to push his plane to the side so it won’t tumble into the tower room when the hatch opens. The initial response to this instruction is a baffled silence, a silence that seems to ask, “Are you _joking?”_

“It’s not a plane, it’s an escape pod,” Ben finally explains, and for some reason Kylo sucks in a breath upon hearing his voice. “It’s a little heavy.”

A hint of impatience flickers across Kylo’s features. “If it’s an escape pod, it should be lighter than a plane,” he points out.

We are treated to a series of grunts on Liszt and a metallic scraping noise on the roof. After a few minutes of this, Ben pants, “All clear.”

“Great,” Kylo snipes. He is… tense. The moment he’d heard Ben’s voice through the frequency, he’d become even more tense than usual. Suspicion is written all over his features.

I pull the lever.

The hatch slides open, letting in sunlight and blue sky. There’s a strangled yell from above, and then a body crashes into the floor, face-first. I hear the crack of joints, the thud of flesh. I wince in sympathy.

Kylo and I stare at the new arrival as he slowly eases himself into a standing position. And my heart drops into my stomach and the tower room feels like it’s being ripped out from under my feet, because I am looking at… Kylo. The same six feet and three inches of him, albeit clad in the officer’s uniform of the Alderaanian military— fitted navy trousers and a matching double-breasted tunic, with accents of red and gold. Kylo without the scar, with tidier dark hair. Kylo with a lightness to his features, a certain boyishness that makes me think that— in the same way that Rose must have seen her future in Marie’s undead corpse— I am looking at the past.

The man who is Kylo but not Kylo— whose name is Ben— mutters a string of curses under his breath, rubbing his nose in pain. “About time,” he wheezes. “I was roasting up there. Fuck this tropical weather. You could’ve warned me about the hatch, though, I’d have gotten out of the way. Am I bleeding?” He tilts his chin to us, holding his arms at his sides, presenting himself for inspection.

And once he gets a good look at us, he blinks and his jaw drops. His brown eyes widen in amazement, and I think that it is strange and dizzying to see these features that are identical to Kylo’s so unguarded and so open, and I think that his amazement is as much for me as it is for the sight of his other self.

I shake my head. “No,” I say. “You’re not bleeding.”

An odd feeling builds up within me, a blend of incredulity and what seems almost like hunger. I gaze at him in silence, studying every aspect of his appearance, committing it to memory. He looks like Kylo, yes, but he is also the first person from the affluent, all-powerful Core that I have seen in person. He is the first person who isn’t Kylo— even if he is him, has to be him, in a way— that I have seen so up close in two years. I am seized by the fear that he isn’t real, that he is only a vision conjured by my loneliness. I am afraid to blink because he might disappear.

After what seems like an eternity, Ben relaxes. “Well.” He lets out a long, slow whistle. “I wasn’t expecting _this.”_

“What. The. Fuck,” Kylo says in the flattest tone that’s ever fallen from his lips, “are you doing here?”

Ben grimaces. “I was supposed to rendezvous with High Command in Niima City. As you can see—” He ruefully gestures to the withered forests and the ravaged coastline beyond the windows. “I seem to have overshot my landing.”

“By miles,” I confirm, finding my voice at last. “Niima’s in the heart of Namenthe’s Crater. This is the edge…”

I trail off, flustered, because the moment I started speaking Ben had turned fully to me with a sweet, attentive smile, a flash of white teeth on a handsome face spattered with beauty marks. Like he’s fond of me, for some reason. I don’t know how to deal with it.

I sneak a glance at Kylo standing beside me. His dark gaze is stony, his fists clenched at his sides.

“We wanted to avoid hostile airspace,” Ben explains once it’s painfully obvious that my tongue has taken a raincheck, “so we went the roundabout way, approaching from the south. But our jet got caught in a raid— I think it was the Ogem Republic, their destroyers are the only ones capable of dropping EMPs the size of houses, after all.”

“Ogem uses electromagnetic pulses in their attacks?” Kylo says sharply.

Ben nods. “Since, oh, about five months ago. Drives the top brass nuts. That, and the devilishly quick bastards we’ve been getting from Malian as of late.”

Kylo and I exchange uneasy glances. Apparently, the fast offensive a few days ago was not an isolated case, and there are now destroyers that can somehow incorporate huge EMP grenades. We might never have known if Ben hadn’t crashed on top of our tower and told us. It occurs to me once more how remote Kelvin Ridge is, how isolated Kylo and I are from the rest of the world. We are soldiers without a war.

“Anyway,” Ben continues, “long story short, our engines got fried. My bodyguard pushed me into one of the escape pods, but I had no idea how to fly the thing. I lost my bearings. So here I am.”

“Where were you when the destroyer hit?” I ask.

“Over Goazon.”

Beside me, Kylo stiffens upon hearing the name of his home in this lookalike’s voice. The Goazon region. The second province. The ghost island. The Badlands.

“I need to make contact with your High Command right away,” says Ben. “I need to tell them what happened. We’ve got to send out a recovery mission as soon as possible.”

“Doubtful.” Kylo snorts. “Once an aircraft goes down over the Badlands, it’s usually given up for lost.”

“They’ll make an exception in this case,” Ben declares. “There was something on that jet. I’m not at liberty to divulge specifics, but let’s just say it’s something that will help Jakku win the war in the Western Reaches.”

*

Most of the afternoon is spent at the dashboard, trying to get through to Niima High Command. I fiddle with different stations and Kylo configures the transceiver while Ben hovers anxiously.

No amount of tweaking produces a human voice on the other end or anything that isn’t either static or dead silence. Liszt is down.

Kylo shakes his head. “This is not good,” he says tersely. “The cities in the Crater could be under attack right now. Or they may have already fallen.”

I turn to Ben. “Could you have dislodged the antenna when you landed?”

“It’s possible,” he admits. “I wasn’t really looking where I was going, to be honest. I _may_ have hit it.”

Kylo points to one of the numerous bulbs on the dashboard. “If there’s a problem with the antenna, this should be going off like crazy,” he mutters. “But I guess I should take a look, just in case.” His features screw up in mild annoyance. Over the months he has learned to take comfort in even the most stifling kind of familiarity; he resents this interruption in the same routine that has soured him to life.

Not to mention the fact that Ben’s presence has obviously put him on edge.

I place a hand on Kylo’s back, my fingers skimming the curve of his shoulder blade in a soothing motion. He rolls his eyes at me, but the crook of his mouth lets me know that he appreciates the gesture.

Kylo retrieves the emergency ladder from storage and climbs out the roof hatch, leaving me alone with Ben. My nerves buzz. I am awkward in my own skin. I know how to behead a zombie and what to do in case of an enemy destroyer, but I have no idea how to handle the presence of a stranger in my tower room. Two years on Kelvin Ridge, and I have fallen out of the habit of small talk. Two years, and I no longer know how to act around anyone who isn’t Kylo. Even if he _is_ Kylo, in a fashion. Or maybe Kylo is him.

“Tea?” I offer uneasily, in a voice that sounds strangled even to my own ears.

Ben grins. I flush. “Coffee, maybe?” he ventures.

I lead him to the makeshift kitchen. He smells like the world outside, like grass and smoke and sunlight, with a splash of cinnamon aftershave. I inhale deeply, reveling in the forgotten wonder of these scents, while trying not to be too obvious about it.

He takes a seat at the crate-table and I brew coffee for him and tea for myself. For a while there is nothing but silence, broken only by the hiss of steam, the gurgle of boiling water, and Kylo’s footsteps on the roof.

When I bring Ben his cup, he thanks me. I mumble an appropriate response and sit down across from him. I am bursting with questions, but the first words that I utter are brought about by the realization that I haven’t even introduced myself.

“I’m Rey.”

“Rey,” he echoes, and my heart leaps at this, at hearing my name out of someone else’s lips, even as it also occurs to me that he says it like he… somehow already knew. “That’s a pretty name. Where is it from?”

I shrug, trying not to blush _again._ “The Sisters of the Apocalypse gave it to me. I don’t know what it means.” I change the subject. “How’s it going? The war elsewhere?”

Technically, Alderaan, Coruscant, and Corellia are the only nations left standing in the Core. They are allies with one another, as well as allies of Jakku. But there are several other countries in the regions of the Expanse and the Middle that are trying to invade them, and they have recently started striking back instead of sticking to purely defensive maneuvers.

“Dismally,” Ben replies with candor. “We’re losing our footholds in Sibensko because of the harsh weather conditions— it’s winter over there now. In Kashyyyk, we are faring marginally better, but not as well as we’d like. All those vast deserts to contend with, you know. The zombies there are _fast._ They just keep coming. We think there’s still some nuclear and biochemical residue left in that area. Our scientists believe the undead are drawing up strength and recuperative abilities from the irradiated sands.”

“That’s possible?”

“I don’t see why not. Radiation does strange things to human bodies, after all. And if there are traces of Black Death left— well, we’re in for it.”

“The first zombies surfaced in the depths of nuclear winter.” I recite what Sister Maz told us once, so long ago. “They rose up from the oceans of Chemical Z.”

“Right. Of course, no one called it Chemical Z back then. It was simply just the Black Death toxin.” Ben shakes his head. “If only they— the previous generations— had known what it would end up doing…”

“They couldn’t have,” I say. “Known, I mean.”

“I suppose you’re right.” He sips his coffee.

And I can no longer resist the urge to just _know._

“Who is the clone?” I blurt out. “You or Kylo— who came before— and how…?”

Ben sets down his cup. “The two of you haven’t talked about it at all, I gather?”

“No.” I am at once embarrassed and defensive. “He’s… not like that.”

“Yeah, I bet.” Ben snorts, and for a fleeting moment he _is_ Kylo, until I remember the uniform and the lack of a scar. “Trying to get him to open up was like pulling teeth when we were kids. I’m not surprised that that’s still the case.” He takes another swig of coffee. “The truth is, we don’t know which of us is the clone. Our parents wouldn’t tell us— I think they didn’t want one to feel like he was inferior to the other. You see, back in Chandrila— in its last years, I mean— so many people were being lost to the undead or dying in the war that the government finally implemented a law to clone everyone at birth, not just orphans. The rationale being that one could then be handed off to the dwindling military. It was a last-ditch attempt to save the state, and of course it didn’t work. Kylo and I were eight years old when the zombies tore down the wall around Hanna City. We were separated in the stampede to the refugee ships— our mother was holding on to my hand, our father to his. I didn’t know until today that he’d wound up in Jakku.”

“Your father, too,” I say quietly. “Kylo told me that he lived in the Goazon Badlands with his father.”

Ben swallows. “Is Dad…?”

“I don’t know.” I drop my eyes from his, unable to look at all the hope in his expression. “As you’ve already gathered, he doesn’t talk about the past a lot.”

“I’d ask him, but I’m afraid he’ll bite my head off.”

I crack a smile.

Ben picks up the frayed threads of the previous subject of our conversation. “Jakku is very important to us,” he tells me. “You are our only ally in the Western Reaches. If you were to surrender, there would be a shift in power— and _not_ to the Core’s favor. That’s why we’re determined to help you stand your ground against Malian, Ogem, and Ponemah. That’s why I _need_ to get that briefcase to Niima High Command.”

“Briefcase?” I repeat. “That’s what you lost, over the Badlands?”

He nods. “It’s made of virtually indestructible material, so I’m not too worried about it burning up or getting shattered in a crash. If the jet fell into the sea, though, that’s a different story.”

“It could be worse than that.” I map out the geography of the Jakku archipelago in my head. After the Badlands, there is Burke’s Trailing— the sea that surrounds us all— and after Burke’s Trailing, before Namenthe’s Crater… “The jet could have landed in the Valley of the Dead.”

Ben shivers.

Kylo’s voice drifts down to us, requesting me to come up to the roof with a battery pack. I comply, wondering what he needs it for.

I look around after I’ve hauled myself out of the hatch. Kylo’s shirt lies in a pool of white cotton at his feet, revealing taut muscles beneath pale skin gleaming with sweat in the hot sun. His loose gray pants hang from his hips. Under different circumstances, I would have taken the time to appreciate the striking figure he cuts, all broad shoulders and narrow waist, but, as it is, I am too distracted by the view of the landscape.

Kelvin Ridge splays out at our sides in a stretch of rugged peaks; it’s a clear day, and if I squint, I can distinguish the vague silhouettes of other watchtowers in the distance. From our high vantage point, I can see the glittering metal skyline of the Crater, and— if I turn ever so slightly— the black expanse of Burke’s Trailing.

“Nothing wrong with the antenna,” Kylo remarks, tilting his head in the direction of the tall mass of spindly poles and wires at the edge of the roof. “And Namenthe’s Crater hasn’t exactly been reduced to smoldering ruins. It could be just a technical difficulty.”

I hold out the battery pack to him. He takes it and climbs into Ben’s escape pod, a silver craft, tiny but sleek, with tinted emerald windows. I hear a whirring sound, and I see the glow of control lights, all of which soon die down when Kylo emerges, battery pack in hand.

“This thing’s in perfect condition. Not even a scratch,” he reports. “It just ran out of power.” His gaze narrows. “An excellent landing, if you ask me. For someone who claims he doesn’t know how to fly.”

I smirk. “What are you trying to say?”

“We’re dealing with a person who’s either incredibly lucky or a liar.”

“Why would he lie, though?”

Kylo shrugs. “I just think we should be careful.”

“You don’t trust your…” I hesitate, wondering if I can risk making this joke, then deciding to take the plunge. “Your brother?”

He narrows his eyes at me. “I see that he still doesn’t know when to stop running his mouth.”

“He doesn’t,” I agree, straight-faced. Then, I say more solemnly, “He asked about your father.”

A careful blankness shutters over Kylo’s features, and I know that the conversation is done. He lapses into silence, studying our surroundings with an expression that begins to look suspiciously like loss.

Afternoon sunlight drips into my eyes as I drink in the panorama of land and water once more. My heart tightens in my chest. This is why neither Kylo or I spend much time on the roof, even when being cooped up indoors drives us slightly mad, because to see it all like this is to want to return to it. This is the world. This is what I am missing. This is what I’ve given up for the greater good.

“I’m getting out of here,” Kylo promises quietly. More to himself than to me. “One way or another, I’m getting out of here.”

*

Ben’s dark head is bent over the communicator in his palm when Kylo and I return to the tower room. I am brought up short by sudden realization at the sight.

“If Liszt is down,” I say slowly, “how were you able to contact us?”

Ben holds up the device. It is a matte black color, shaped like a scarab beetle.

“This communicator is top-of-the-line,” he tells us. “Even if radio transmissions are down, as long as there’s a nearby transceiver sending out a frequency signature, it can usually patch me through.”

“Convenient,” mutters Kylo. He sounds bored, but his dark eyes shine with interest. As I suspect mine are doing as well. This is our common ground, this childlike fascination with technology.

“It really is,” Ben enthusiastically agrees, and in that moment he and Kylo look even more alike than they already do. Just a couple of brawny nerds. “In fact, it has a long-range function, too. If you could lend me a spare battery pack, we might be able to get in touch with your High Command.”

*

There are three of us at dinner that night. Because we’re still trying to get the communicator to work, Kylo and I agree to turn the lights on just this once, confident in our newly-restocked power core. I heat up a can of refried beans and manage to scrounge up spare utensils for Ben.

Kylo barely touches his plate, so intent is he on the new device. I can tell that he’s itching to take it apart and examine its inner mechanism more closely. He and Ben push buttons and input coordinates, but they fail to make contact. I did not think it was possible, but as the silence stubbornly rolls on, I feel lonelier than I have ever been, adrift in an ocean of static.

Finally, when the lights have burned for more than an hour, I declare that it’s time to turn in.

“We can try again tomorrow,” I say.

The extra bedding is still damp from laundry day, but Ben tells us he’ll be fine sleeping in one of the swivel chairs.

“Here.” Kylo hands him a pair of boxers, making a face. “You can keep it.”

I can’t help myself. I laugh. The sound of my own mirth shocks me, as it always has ever since Marie died. What a stranger I am now to the little things.

*

I have difficulty falling asleep that night. I am too conscious of Ben Organa’s presence, of the unfamiliar pattern of his breathing, of the creaks as he stirs in the uncomfortable chair. He has positioned himself at the dashboard, by the windows, so that when my eyes adjust to the darkness I catch glimpses of him shadowed against a mess of stars.

And then Kylo steals softly out of his bed and joins Ben by the dashboard, and there are two of them, outlined in silver, Ben sitting in the swivel chair and Kylo standing over him.

Ben gives a sudden jolt, as if he’d been sleeping. “Fuck, you scared the shit out of me.”

“Where’s Mom?” Kylo demands without preamble.

I throw the covers over my head, willing myself to shut out this conversation that I have no right to, but the night is silent and still and their voices carry.

“She’s gone,” Ben replies. “Heart attack, a few years ago.” There is a pause and then he adds, “Don’t worry, it was quick. She didn’t suffer.”

“Were— were you the one who—”

I have never heard Kylo struggle for words before. He is a quiet sort of man but, whenever he does speak, it has always been so measured, as if he calculates the weight of all his words before letting them leave his mouth. This stumbling of his throws me for a loop, sends a pang through my heart.

He's asking if Ben had been the one to chop off their mother’s head before she could Turn.

“No,” Ben tells him. In his tone, in the dark, under my covers, he sounds relieved and regretful all at once. “I was away on a diplomatic mission to the Colonies. But she made it to the hospital and she was taken care of until the end. Don’t worry,” he says again.

Kylo doesn’t respond for a long time. It’s Ben who breaks the silence. I can differentiate their voices only because Ben’s has a hint of a rasp, and Kylo’s is a deeper sort of bass rumble.

“What about Dad?”

“He’s gone, too.”

That’s all that Kylo offers to the brother who is not his brother, to this self of his that is not his own self. I squeeze my eyes shut.

And, later, when Kylo goes back to bed, he crawls under my covers and not his own. I make no sound of either surprise or protest. I let him hold me, I run my hands through his hair, I let myself be the breaker to the waves of his sullen, dry-eyed grief until we both fall asleep.

* * *

**_15 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

The next morning, Kylo brings the battered old chess board up from out of storage. He is more troubled than he lets on, if he would seek out such a distraction. Ben’s eyes gleam topaz-bright when he sees Kylo setting up the game in the kitchen.

“Do you play?” Kylo asks him. After last night’s conversation, they’ve apparently settled into a tentative sort of truce. Or perhaps an understanding. And Ben keeps looking from me to Kylo with a certain… amusement. I wonder if he saw Kylo join me in my bed last night.

“Not the traditional version, no,” avers Ben. “I prefer antichess.”

“Teach me,” says Kylo.

Antichess, as it turns out, is the kind of game where you win by losing. The objective, according to Ben, is to get all your pieces captured. As they play, I sit with them, leaning forward slightly, fascinated by the novelty of it all. Ben and Kylo are evenly matched; both are fast thinkers, moving their pieces with a certain calculated recklessness.

A crackle of static breaches the silence. We all jump, startled. The red light on Ben’s communicator, which he was placed on the table, is glowing, signaling an incoming transmission. Ben makes a grab for the device, upsetting the chess board in the process. Wooden figures tumble down, spilling onto the floor, but we don’t bother picking them up. They can wait.

“Yes, hello?” Ben barks excitedly into the communicator. “Hello? Who is this?”

We wait for a response, holding our breath.

And then she speaks, the voice from my past, the voice that I would know anywhere in the world, shrouded though it is by static.

It is my voice, and yet not.

**_“Captain Organa? Captain, are you there?”_ **

A broad grin stretches over Ben’s face. “Kira!” he exclaims. “You’re all right! Thank God! Are the blueprints with you?”

Kylo raises an eyebrow at me. “Blueprints?” he mouths. I am too stunned to do anything, too stunned to even respond with so much as a shrug because I have no idea what Ben’s talking about.

**_“I took the other escape pod,”_** says Kira. **_“There was no time to—”_**

The connection falters. The rest of her words are swallowed by mechanical crackling.

Ben’s knuckles whiten around the communicator. “Kira, can you hear me? The jet— where is it?”

**_“It crashed over the Badlands.”_ **

“What about you?” Ben asks urgently. He notices me staring, and he shoots me a rueful grin. A paltry apology for not telling me that he’d been with my clone all along, that he knew who I was the moment he laid eyes on me.

**_“I crashed, too.”_** The frequency hums with static, with the wry tones of my other self. **_“My escape pod was badly damaged and I had no choice but to bring it down.”_** I can visualize her humorless smirk from the way she says it alone. She speaks without knowing that I’m there, that I’m listening. **_“I’m in the Valley of the Dead. Sorry, Captain.”_**

*

Every child in Jakku grows up hearing horror stories about Hiila Basin, otherwise known as the Valley of the Dead. Cordoned off from the rest of Niima Province by the tall, steep Sko’rraq Mountains, it is a desolate place inhabited only by zombies. Their aimless wandering takes them through the many caves that lead into the valley, and only a few find their way out again.

Back at the orphanage, Sister Maz described Hiila Basin as an ocean of grasping hands and blood-stained teeth. She was one of those who embarked on the ill-fated mission to evacuate the last remaining human settlements in the weeks after the Surges, when a series of air raids forced large groups of zombies in the direction of the caves. Only a handful of rescuers and civilians made it out alive.

Kira informs Ben that she has found refuge in one of the higher caves that presumably lead out to the beaches of Burke’s Trailing. **_“I’m running out of ammo,”_** she says. **_“Obviously, that means I have no plans to go further in. But, as of the moment, I’m safe.”_**

I exhale a breath of relief. I don’t dare to speak, I don’t dare to alert her to my presence. Perhaps there’s a part of me that’s afraid. We were never very close, having always been forced into each other’s orbit by mutual friends. I haven’t seen her in two years. She is as much a stranger to me now as she was even back then, and even in the dark, that one night that our fingers fumbled together and I cried out into her neck

“What about the zombies in the Basin?” Ben asks.

**_“I’m looking down at them now,”_** Kira replies. A trace of dark humor slips into her next words. **_“They are very much undead and biting.”_**

“Where’s your escape pod?”

**_“Where I left it. At the base of the Sko’rraq.”_ **

And it seems to me that I see every single decision play out across Ben’s pale features, quickly discarded and replaced. In stark contrast, Kylo might as well be made of stone only inches away. I realize with a jolt that Kylo has no idea who Ben is talking to and why I’m so affected by it.

“Kira,” Ben says slowly, “here’s what I need you to do. Go back to the escape pod and check if its radar is still working. Try to get a fix on the jet; if it’s in the Badlands, you may be able to pick up a signal. The briefcase has a built-in homing device, too. Trawl for that as well. Do you think…” He hesitates, concern wrinkling his brow. “Do you think you can do that?”

There is a short silence from the other end. The enormity of the task is staggering— to leave a safe haven and climb back down into the lowlands where the zombies wait. I expect her to refuse.

But, finally, she says, **_“I’ll head down tomorrow. At midday, when the sun’s high and they’re less active. But I have to sign off now— I don’t think this communicator’s got much juice left.”_**

Ben closes his eyes. “I’ll come for you soon, sweetheart.”

The air leaves my lungs. My eyes nearly pop out of my skull.

_Sweetheart._

**_“I mean, don’t go out of your way on my account,”_** Kira grunts. **_“Bye.”_**

Ben sets his communicator down on the table, head bowed as if deep in thought. After a while, he looks up and his sharp features are steely with resolve.

“We have to get her out of there,” he declares.

Kylo raises an eyebrow. _“We?”_

Ben flushes slightly. “That came out wrong. What I was supposed to say was— I need you to take me into Namenthe’s Crater so that I can instruct Niima High Command to orchestrate a rescue mission.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your escape pod,” Kylo points out. “We can restock your power core and you’ll be good to go.”

“But I can’t fly, remember? I’d only crash it again.”

Kylo shrugs. “You landed pretty well.”

“Sheer luck, unfortunately. And, besides, I barely know the way.”

“It’s a five-day trip through the tunnels. Who knows if…” Kylo trails off, but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to say the words, because the sentiment is obvious. Once you’re stranded in Hiila Basin, it’s only a matter of time before your luck runs out.

“You don’t understand.” Ben smiles, but it’s not one of his flashy grins; this one is soft. Affectionate, almost. “If anyone can survive in the Valley of the Dead, it’s Kira.” He turns to me. “And you know that as well as I do, don’t you, Rey?”

Kylo blinks. I stiffen.

“I’m sorry for not telling you right away,” Ben continues, his brown eyes fixed on me, beseeching. “I wasn’t sure how you’d take the news, and I could hardly believe it, myself. Talk about coincidence, yeah?”

Now Kylo is staring at me, too. There’s a hint of resentment in his gaze and I know, I know, because you can’t live with someone for two years and not know them, that he doesn’t like the fact that there’s information concerning me in some way that Ben is privy to and he is not.

“She’s my clone,” I mumble. I am unable to meet Kylo’s eyes, so I look at Ben instead. “I assume that she’s in the Alliance Special Forces?”

“Yes,” Ben confirms. “That’s how she came to be assigned to me, as my bodyguard. She’s saved my ass more times than I can count.” His expression takes on a vaguely dreamy note. “The things that woman can do with a sword…”

And I can’t explain it, but it feels as though I’m back in the courtyard at Our Lady of Mercy, standing in line and missing one target after another while Kira is perfect every single time.

“Rey and I will discuss it.” Kylo’s clipped tones bring me back to the present moment. “Go stand over there, _Captain.”_

He all but sneers this last word, this title, and Ben huffs and stomps off, and soon Kylo and I are huddled at the dashboard, keeping our voices low while Ben desultorily packs up the chess game.

Kylo doesn’t bring up Kira or my failure to tell him about her. Instead, he says, “I think that we should escort him through the tunnels.”

I gape at him. “You’re mad. High Command will shoot us for abandoning our post. You want to be another statistic for the firing squad?”

“With Liszt on the blink, we’re not of much use here anyway.”

“Someone’s definitely noticed that communications are down by now. Someone will be sent over to fix it—”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Rey,” he brusquely interrupts. “We go for _days_ without any word from the Crater. They only pay attention to us when we radio in a destroyer warning. Weeks could pass before they realize something’s wrong.”

Kylo’s reaching. He really is. His eyes burn with desperation. He’s wringing his hands in a silent plea for me to respond to his hunger with my own, to throw caution to the winds and just get the hell out of this place. I can almost taste freedom; it’s thick on my tongue, it beckons like Odysseus’ sirens. I’ve yearned to escape, and here, at last, is a reason to do so. It’s flimsy, and there will be repercussions, but this is war and you take what you can get.

The question is, should I?

If I flee through the tunnels only to face my execution on the other end, then I will have carried Marie’s bullet for nothing. I didn’t pull the trigger three years ago to be gunned down for desertion now. I took an oath when I enlisted in the Armed Forces. I can already hear Sister Maz barking in my ear. _Duty. You are a soldier. Remember your duty._

“Fine,” I say to Kylo. “You go. I’ll stay.”

He’s already shaking his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not leaving you here—”

“It’s better than leaving the watchtower unmanned,” I snap. “You’re right; someone _has_ to take him into the Crater. It’s important. But someone also has to stay here. That’s important, too. That’s why there are two of us. In case of emergencies like this. If we do it this way, it won’t be desertion. Just… delegation.”

Kylo stares at me, unblinking and tight-lipped, considering this compromise, this easy way out that I’m offering. Various emotions play along the curves and hollows of his face. I’ve seen this face every day for the past seven hundred and thirty days. I’m privy to its every nuance. I see the indecision, the yearning. And then I see the letting go, and I know what he will say even before the words leave his mouth. I let him say it anyway, because he needs to know that I know, because that’s what our two years together in this tower mean.

“You should go with him, Rey.” Kylo’s shoulders sag almost imperceptibly. “I’m much more used to being alone than you are.”

“The only time I’ve ever managed to shoot something was when it was right in front of me,” I argue, and there’s a part of me that shrivels at the fact that I’m referencing Marie’s death in this callous manner. “I won’t be able to protect him if… if anything. You’re better with guns. You can actually aim, for a start. You go. I’ll stay.”

“But you won’t be able to bear it,” Kylo murmurs.

I think about the air raid shelters. I think about the Mother in pieces at my feet, the bits of Marie’s brain spilling into my eyes. I think about arms turned to quivering jelly from too many pushups and hands scrubbed raw from washing dishes and eyes following sick friends and mentors as they were ushered into the infirmary for the Vigil. I think about how Finn never made even one stupid joke the day we were shipped out and the way Kira looked back at me before getting on the helicopter that would take her to her new life, the features that were like mine but prouder tense with fear. And I think about the day I never wanted to go down from the rooftop, and all the days I’ve spent in this tower wishing I could.

“You have no idea,” I say to Kylo, flashing him a taut smile, “just how much I am able to bear.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for missing the usual update day, as I've spent most of this week asleep (😎), but I hope that this chapter makes up for it! Thank you to artisticartery for [this fantastic sketch](https://kylorenvevo.tumblr.com/post/642414987736907776/just-finished-reading-the-last-chapter-of-like) of our three apocalypse babies!

**_15 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

**_Later_ **

Kylo and Ben are to leave at first light the next day. I help pack their supplies and their gear; it’s something to do, something to take my mind off of the anxiety that has started to sink its claws into the pit of my stomach.

The tower room feels too small with more than two people moving around in it. Or, rather, Kylo and I move, filling two survival packs with enough water bottles and rations to last five days and a little extra. We inspect lengths of rope for any sign of fraying, we sharpen knives and we oil guns until they’re almost as good as new.

Ben just sort of… stands around. Observing us with an air of befuddlement. In truth, I do not think that this man knows how to do much of anything. He is an officer, yes, but one with Alderaan’s foreign liaisons corps. There is an easygoing softness to him that’s missing from Kylo or even from myself.

I do not understand what Kira sees in him.

_Sweetheart,_ he’d called her.

Meanwhile, Kylo and I are circling each other apprehensively. I no longer know how to be without him, and the thought of being separated from him for so long is almost too much to bear. We are so busy with our preparations and with running through various contingency plans that there is no time for the two of us to be alone. No time for me to show him all the things that I can never say out loud. I see the quiet desperation that I feel reflected in his eyes every time he looks at me.

As tomorrow draws nearer with each passing second, so does some burgeoning sense of panic dig its heels tighter and tighter into my system. And once darkness has fallen over land and sea and Kylo crawls into my bed, I almost weep in relief.

He throws the covers over our heads and he kisses me, and of course I kiss him back. I can’t even think about how there’s someone else in the room with us, I can’t even think about how Ben is sleeping in the swivel chair by the dashboard only a few feet away. The hunger burns through me. The urgency of Kylo’s hands and lips are echoed in my own movements. He tugs down my pajama bottoms and my underwear— and his as well, his erection smooth and rigid and warm against my thigh— and he pushes a thick, blunt finger into me, and I stifle a cry against his neck.

Quiet. We have to be quiet. Even if the world is a graveyard and all that I want to do is scream.

I come impaled on two of Kylo’s fingers, his breath hot in my ear, my hips rocking against his palm. “Good girl,” he whispers hoarsely, and then his fingers are gone and the empty space that they have left is replaced by his cock, hilting inside me in one deep thrust. I moan at the stretch of it, and—

—and _Ben_ says something in his sleep, shifting in the swivel chair, its wheels gliding along the floor.

I freeze, but Kylo doesn’t. He snaps his hips against mine, his lips slanting over my parted mouth and swallowing the gasp that I let out at the sudden pressure, the stretch of his hard length splitting me open.

“Goddamn nuisance,” he mutters against my cheek as he fucks me, in a heated tone that’s meant for Ben. “Ever since we were kids—”

I exhale a quiet laugh at his petulance, but then he hits a spot inside me that makes me see stars and I am no longer laughing. I dig my nails into his broad shoulders and I spiral as he moves above me, man made of darkness, raining kisses all over my face, and I’m fighting back tears because this might be the last time. Every time might be the last time.

* * *

**_16 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

With dawn breaking, it’s time for Kylo and Ben to head out. I accompany them down the elevator and into the basement, spatters of Kylo’s dried spend gilding the insides of my thighs. I open the door that marks the exit— or the entrance, depending where you’re coming from. The three of us gaze into the yawning mouth, the long stretch of darkness; we breathe in the chill and the dust of the underground tunnels.

“We’ll be in touch,” Ben promises, his scarab beetle communicator dangling from his fingers. “Stand by Liszt. If something were to happen, you’re our only backup.”

I nod. I can’t quite look at him. I am not sure if he knows what Kylo and I did last night. If perhaps he woke up and heard…

Ben steps past me and into the shadows. Kylo follows but then hesitates, one hand on the door frame, his face turned to me.

I know he’s thinking of another journey, two years ago, when he and I stood at the opposite end of these tunnels and went into the dark together. He still looks mostly the same—perhaps a little gaunter and his hair a little longer. I wonder how much I myself have changed through his eyes.

“Your freckles,” he muses.

“What about them?” I ask.

He gives a sort of half-shrug, the line of his mouth softening. “There were a lot more of them back then.”

_Pay attention,_ my mind instructs me. _The tone of his voice, the look on his face. This is important. This moment is important. This moment you can keep._

“Stay safe,” I whisper. _Come back to me,_ is what I don’t say. But he understands; he hears the words I cannot speak, because he is Kylo and I am Rey and together we have no choice but to be unbreakable.

When they’re gone, I return to the tower room. I busy myself with sweeping the floor and making the beds and trying to fix the radio. It isn’t until teatime rolls around and I prepare two cups out of habit that I truly realize I am alone.

* * *

**_17 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

The tower is older than I am. I feel its creaks deep in my bones, deep in the silence of having no one to talk to. The first night is marked by staring unseeing at the ceiling or into the shadows where Kylo’s empty bed is, in between bouts of fitful sleep. Come daylight I am a ghost, dry-mouthed and baggy-eyed, the silence roaring in my ears.

I lose myself in the usual morning routine. Push-ups, stomach crunches, jumping jacks, jogging in place. Enough to work up a sweat, to get my pulse started. And if my form is less than perfect, if I don’t jump high enough or dip my body all the way, it’s because Kylo isn’t around to criticize me for slacking off. Not that he’s a perfectionist himself— I can’t even count the number of times that our military-prescribed exercise routine devolved into a wrestling match at his instigation.

I am surprised by a rumble in my stomach. I glance at the clock. Half-past eight in the morning. There’s no breakfast on the table because today is supposed to be Kylo’s turn to cook. What a funny thing the mind is. My subconscious had known what day it was but I had completely forgotten that Kylo wasn’t here.

I content myself with scrambled eggs and leftover rice; I remember to make enough for only one person and it feels like a victory.

After eating, I read. There’s a crate in the corner of the room that’s filled with books, either donated by some generous long-ago soldier for the tower’s next occupants, or accidentally left behind when that soldier transferred. It hasn’t been disturbed in months; you can only read the same pages over and over again for so long. But what else is there to do today in the midst of all this solitude, this radio silence?

I dig my hands into the crate; dust motes and the musty smell of old paper waft into the air. I extract what I adamantly maintain is my favorite volume, although Kylo would scoff in that manner of his that suggests I am still a child in so many ways. It’s a collection of fairytales, something that won’t look out of place in the archive room at Our Lady of Mercy, next to Poe’s cherished songs. I briefly entertain the idea that its owner was an orphan, too, and had filched it before getting shipped out. It’s a kid’s book, not at all suitable for someone my age, but I like the delicate gilded illustrations, the calligraphic font, the stories of things that never were.

The first tale is about a mysterious man with a mysterious name— no one knows what it is, but they have to guess it. It’s a strange story, humorous but also a bit on the creepy side; the guy has some _serious_ issues.

I wonder where my own name came from, what it means. I had never asked any of the Sisters. I lived at the monastery almost all my life; now, two years after the helicopter took me away, it strikes me as peculiar that there are still things that have been left unsaid.

I flip to the middle of the book, to the fairytale that I hate reading but am perennially drawn to anyway. The girl in the tower. The girl with hair like gold.

This story used to make me go cross-eyed with rage, much to Kylo’s never-ending amusement. “If I were her,” I had railed once, as we sat on the floor with our backs against his bed frame, “I’d escape the first chance I got. Tie my hair to the bed post and jump down. Or something.”

“You’d break your neck,” Kylo had pointed out. “From the whiplash.”

I’d scowled at him. “I hate it when you go all physics on me.”

And he had buried his smirk in my neck, and the book had slipped from my fingers and tumbled to the floor, the infuriating story forgotten, Rapunzel lost in a whirl of paper and ink.

*

This is how Kylo and I become what we are: sun in my eyes, my ears straining to catch his name above the roar of engines at the military base in Niima City. The bumpy truck ride to the entrance of the tunnels, and then the journey through the dark, compasses and communicators in our hands. For five days we exist to each other as vague shapes and sudden swaths of faces and bodies tangled in the glare of flashlights.

It’s not until we’re in the tower that we have our first real conversation. We’d argued about something, I no longer remember what but it had been so fiery and it had been a relief to be able to shout, after all that time spent in the dark and the silence. Things are not much improved a few days later, when he chokes on my first disastrous attempt at brewing tea and accuses me of trying to murder him.

Fast forward to the night of the first storm, the power running low because we haven’t learned how to conserve it yet. Unable to take the elevator, we huddle on the floor of the kitchen as the wind howls outside and rocks and branches slam into the glass panels. It’s monsoon season; it was already raining when the Malian destroyer reared up on the horizon. The world shakes and I feel so small. I bite down on my lip so I don’t scream, because I haven’t screamed since Marie and I’ll be damned if I let the Hurricane Wars take that away. A blur of sound and fury and shattering, Kylo’s shoulder digging into mine, _not like this, not with you, not now, not yet…_

And then stillness, a voice on the radio telling us that we are safe, that Jakku fighter jets have taken down the destroyer. Kylo and I stare at each other in quiet disbelief, the hand of death retreating into the folds of night. _Alive. We are alive._

To this day I still don’t know who made the first move, but it doesn’t really matter. Rain taps a gentle rhythm on the windows as his trembling fingers reach out to touch my bleeding lip and lightning illuminates his collarbone. The world in flashes of black and white, him rising above me, hooded gaze falling on every inch of my skin. The feeling, the fluttering, wild like the monsoon. He says my name the way Kira had said it that night at the monastery so long ago, and I pull him down in a kiss laced with the metallic tang of blood. _Alive. We are alive._ Water and darkness everywhere, and I know I will never look back. This life is so much easier without looking back.

* * *

**_19 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

I have been alone for four days now.

It’s the longest I’ve ever gone without talking to anyone. Without being around _someone._

I don’t know how to deal with it.

I feel like I’m going mad.

The walls of the tower room are closing in. At the same time, the ceiling is too high. I have read every book in the crate at least twice, I have exercised until my muscles flinched at the mere thought of moving again, I have played chess with myself until I see the white and dark green squares whenever I close my eyes.

Every few hours or so over the last few days I have gotten unsettled enough to try and make contact with Kylo and Ben, even though I shouldn’t— there’s no sense in wasting the battery pack of Ben’s communicator just because I’m bored. But still I attempt, and my every attempt is met with no response.

I tell myself not to assume the worst— they’re probably only turning on the communicator when they need to use it, it’s what I would do in their situation— but still my mind floods with worst-case scenarios.

Maybe something went wrong. Maybe they’re— gone. Maybe I’ll never see Kylo again.

As much as I try to calm down, I feel dazed with a slow sort of horror that leaches through each passing second and into the next. By now the silence is so loud that I couldn’t have slept even if I’d wanted to, and the insomnia makes me see things, makes things worse than they actually are.

There is a girl in a tower. There is a girl whose limbs are so heavy that she might as well be one of the undead.

I head to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face, hoping that the act will ground me in reality. After I turn off the faucet, I stare at my reflection in the dusty old mirror. My eyes are dull and my skin is tinged gray with sleeplessness. I note what Kylo had mentioned, the decrease in the number of freckles that I have due to being indoors all the time. The lack of sunlight.

I tilt my head, trying to figure out if I can see Kira staring back at me. My hair is gathered up into the usual three buns; at some point in our childhood, she’d taken to wearing hers in a high ponytail. It had been a way to differentiate ourselves, to declare ourselves distinct from the other.

Maybe she’s gone now, too. Maybe she’s joined the corpses shuffling through Hiila Basin.

Maybe I’m all alone in the world.

There is a girl in a tower. This is not the beginning of events, but it is how the story starts— the only story that I ever knew.

* * *

**_20 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

In the afternoon the alarm clock rings. I rush to the dashboard, my heart in my throat. At first I think Liszt is functioning again, that the radio silence has been broken, but when I pick up the transceiver it’s Ben’s voice on the line.

**_“Rey!”_** he yells. In the background, I hear the stutter of gunfire. **_“Get out of there! The tunnels have been breached._ _Get out of there!”_**

Sound and fury and shattering.

*

**_“Take my escape pod,”_** Ben instructs as I hurriedly shove supplies into a duffel bag, the transceiver wedged between my shoulder and my ear. **_“We’ve managed to get above ground. I’ll send our coordinates to the A.I. once we’ve found a safe spot.”_**

“Affirmative,” I mutter, opening the weapons crate and removing the firearms from their plastic cases. Kelvin Watchtower isn’t exactly equipped for assault; after what Kylo and Ben took, I am left with a couple of M16s and a few pistols. I glance longingly at the remaining machine gun, but it won’t fit. _Travel light,_ the nuns had drilled into my head. _If you’re on the move, travel light._ “What happened, anyway?”

There’s a huge explosion on the other end; Kylo’s probably thrown a grenade. **_“One of the tunnels collapsed,”_** Ben says in the aftermath of the noise. **_“Undead started pouring in. We climbed out the emergency ladders and we’re holding them off so far, but we need you.”_** He hesitates, then asks, **_“You_ do _know how to fly, right?”_**

“I grew up in an orphanage,” I snap. “Of course I do.” I load ammunition into the cartridges, check the safeties. _Click, click, click._ “I’m about to leave. Stay alive.”

**_“May we meet again,”_** Ben murmurs, signing off.

After I pull the lever to open the roof hatch, I weigh my options. Technically, I can stay in the tower even if the zombies somehow manage to infiltrate the basement. That’s why there are no stairs; the undead don’t exactly know how to use elevators. I can wait for Liszt to get repaired, I can wait for backup, and hope that a destroyer doesn’t come in the meantime. That’s the safer choice. But Kylo and Ben are in danger. In my mind there’s already an ocean of hands and teeth under my feet. I won’t be Rapunzel. I won’t wait for anyone or anything.

No time to retrieve the ladder from the basement, and, anyway, I’m not going down there even if someone paid me. I push my bed to the center of the room for some added height, then I cast the duffel bag of guns and ammo up onto the side of the roof. I bend down to tuck a couple of knives into each of my boots, and my gaze falls on the chess set perched on the kitchen table.

_Travel light!_ Sister Maz barks across the span of years. _Take only what you need._

“No,” I whisper into the silence. “I’ll take what I can get.”

I grab the chess set and store it into the other duffel bag, which I also heave onto the roof. I make a leap for it, my hands finding purchase on the side of the open hatch. I grit my teeth at the burning sensation of sun-warmed metal and haul myself up.

Once I’ve loaded the supplies into the escape pod, I strap in. It’s a tight squeeze; the cockpit is barely big enough for one person. Ben is far longer and wider than I am, he must have been dying before he landed. I fish out a battery pack from the pocket of my fatigues and rev up the power core. The engine hums to life, the screens light up, and the cool feminine voice of the A.I. fills the enclosed space.

“Come on, come on,” I chant, my hand already on the throttle. I refuse to believe that Ben and Kylo didn’t make it— or, well, Kylo, at least. Ben gives the impression that the hardest thing he’s ever done is ring a doorbell, but Kylo is a fighter. A survivor.

**_“Coordinates received,”_** the A.I. announces smoothly, a string of longitudes and latitudes flashing on the screen.

I exhale the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. I set the compass. I flick the switches. I push the throttle.

And I soar.

I had imagined leaving Kelvin Ridge with Kylo at the end of our five-year stint. We would pack our bags and ready the room for its next occupants. Once they arrived, Kylo and I would undertake the tunnel journey back to Namenthe’s Crater and then the truck ride back to Niima City, where our new orders would be waiting for us. I had imagined us saying our goodbyes as this chapter of our lives came to a close, content that we did the best we could with what we had, glad that we would never have to see this particular tower again.

I had not imagined leaving like this, in a rush, in flight, jetting off into the heart of zombie land. I had not imagined that I would be alone, that I would be keeping my eyes fixed on the horizon opening up before me, stolidly refusing to look back.

*

The thing is, it’s been a while since I was last in a cockpit, and Alderaanian escape pods are speedy, with hair-trigger controls. I am trying not to vomit from the high altitude and the startling velocity, wrestling with the pressure switches while keeping an eye on the power gauge.

The A.I. does most of the steering, but it can’t predict the trees that loom in front of me. After several near misses, I fervently promise myself that I’m never getting into a cockpit again.

**_“Approaching destination,”_** the A.I. tells me. “ ** _Prepare for landing.”_**

I brace myself as the pod takes a sharp dive. The engine screams and the ground rushes up to meet me. Two tall figures wave from a hill. I touch down and coast to a stop, the world still spinning madly in my head. I hastily clamber out of the cockpit.

The instant my boots touch solid ground again, I hurl.

Yeah, _definitely_ never flying again.

I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand as Kylo and Ben approach.

“You made it!” Ben exclaims, grinning broadly, face stained with dirt and sweat.

Kylo comes toward me and I immediately scrutinize him for bruises or bite wounds. He appears fine, although there are spatters of blood on his fatigues. There’s a gleam in his eye.

“Don’t,” I say. “I just threw up.”

“I don’t care,” he mutters, looking absolutely, wonderfully relieved.

I take a step back, trying to hold him off, but he pulls me close and kisses me anyway.

_Alive. We’re alive._

*

The hill’s a good vantage point as any. For the moment, there are no zombies in sight. Kylo inspects the contents of each duffel bag and shoots me a sharp look.

“You didn’t bring the machine gun?” he accuses.

“You already have one.” I point to the firearm slung across his back.

“I’m down to my last round.”

“What, you think I didn’t pack ammo?” I shrug. “I brought the chess set.”

Ben clears his throat. He’s been doing that a lot, ever since he witnessed mine and Kylo’s kiss and the grin on his face had faded and he’d pointedly looked away, embarrassed. I guess having to actually see it right in front of you is different from accidentally overhearing sounds in the middle of the night, or catching a glimpse of two silhouettes shifting in the darkness.

“I could do with a game,” he says.

“Later,” growls Kylo, glancing at the sky. It’s almost sunset. “We need to figure out where to go from here.”

“Are we still making for the Crater?” I ask him.

His brow wrinkles. “The tunnels are out of the question. We’d have to go over.”

I am not up to this task. We are still nestled within Kelvin Ridge, of which our tower is the highest point. There are other lesser peaks around us, but they are steep and overrun by zombies. To get to Namenthe’s Crater, we will have to fight our way up and down, and up and down again. The arduous trek will take much longer than we have food and water for, not to mention that it’s just the three of us against hordes of undead. We’d run out of ammo in a day— if we don’t get bitten, that is.

Returning to the escape pod, I bring up the digital map of Niima Province and cross-reference it with the coordinates that Ben sent.

“The nearest watchtower is the Anchorite,” I say. “Maybe we should ask them for help.”

Kylo squints at the horizon, shielding his eyes from the dying sun’s glare. “I can see the volcano from here. A couple of days away, maybe, if we move fast. However, if one of us flies—”

“And leave the other two?” Ben is quick to interrupt. “We should stick together. There’s no guarantee that their communications system is operational. They might be just as isolated as we are.”

Kylo scowls. “If you want to make a run for the cities in this terrain, be my guest.”

“I was in fact wondering if we could cut across the shoreline,” says Ben brightly.

“No one can enter Namenthe’s Crater from the beachfronts,” I protest. “Babylon is impenetrable. We’d have to wait for the sentries or the aerial patrols to spot us, and even then, fat chance they’d let us in.”

“Getting them to let us in will be easier than getting them to spot us in the first place,” Kylo adds. “What’s three people in a throng of zombies?”

Thousands of undead gather at the Babylon Wall every day, groaning and clawing at the metal structure as if they can sense the living bodies on the other side. Sister Alin once presented a slideshow of black-and-white pictures taken from the air, and I still shudder at the memory of it, of the zombies pooled at the base of the Wall like massive swarms of ants.

“Ah, well. About that.” Ben fiddles with the top button of his coat. “I thought that we might skip the Crater, actually, and rescue Kira ourselves.”

I roll my eyes. “Yes, the three of us charging into the Valley of the Dead. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable plan.”

I look to Kylo for backup, but I’m dismayed to see him rubbing his chin in contemplation.

“No!” I bark in a tone that would make Sister Enyo proud.

Ignoring me, Kylo turns to the escape pod. He plants his hands on one curved wing and experimentally pushes down, observing the way the craft tilts. He nods to himself like he’s satisfied.

“We can do it,” he muses. “We’ll look ridiculous, but we can do it.”

“That statement does not exactly fill me with confidence in whatever you have in mind,” Ben says dryly.

Kylo consults the map again. “One of us in the cockpit, the other two on the wings. We travel low and slow, over the water where the zombies can’t reach us. We approach the Valley of the Dead from Burke’s Trailing—”

I grab Kylo’s arm, putting a stop to his briefing. “Ben, can you give us a minute?”

“Take all the time you need,” Ben drawls. “I’ll just… be here.”

I drag Kylo along until we’re out of earshot, then I release his arm so I can put my hands on my hips.

“Are you suffering from _heatstroke?”_ I hiss. “Have you gone _completely nuts?_ I’m not hanging off a plane while it flies over the damn _ocean!”_

“It’s not a plane, it’s an escape pod.” Kylo’s voice is infuriatingly mild. “And we’ll stick to the shallows, anyway.”

“Look at you, talking about this like you haven’t lost your mind and we’re really going to do it,” I deadpan.

He slips his hands into his pockets. “You have a better plan, then, Rey?”

“Kylo,” I say urgently, “we need to get word to Namenthe’s Crater. We have to report the breach in the tunnels. If the undead find a way into the cities, it’s over.”

“They won’t. The main tunnel doors are heavily guarded. The cities can take care of themselves.”

“But _we_ can’t!” I rail. “I won’t walk into the Valley of the Dead, and I’m not letting you, either!”

My heart pounds furiously in my chest as survival instinct takes over. I carried the bullet; I can’t afford to be selfless or reckless, because that will mean Marie died in vain.

But if I _don’t_ become selfless or reckless, Kira will, too.

“We’re not going _into_ the Valley,” Kylo insists, a bit impatiently now. “Just the caves. We’ll get Kira out and retrieve the briefcase in the Badlands.”

“Oh, so we’re going to _the Badlands_ now? You’re just full of ideas today, aren’t you?” Seriously, what does he think we are, a fucking tour group? I have to clench my fist so I can restrain the urge to break his nose.

“Several military garrisons there. We can ask them for help. Rey, don’t you see?” Kylo takes a deep breath. “If you and I pull this off, we’ll be heroes. I don’t want to scout for the rest of my life, and neither do you. Pension and early retirement for exemplary service— those are the terms, yes? Recovering lost plans crucial to the war— it doesn’t get any more exemplary than that. No more sitting around in watchtowers. You and I will be free.”

“We’ll also be _dead!”_ I shout. I’m practically trembling with shock and disbelief that this usually stern, no-nonsense person would even consider such a ridiculous plan.

Sister Maz told us once that war sometimes drives soldiers to do desperate things; there comes a point when they snap and rush headlong into certain death— breaking position and attacking enemy troops or zombie hordes before the order’s been given, bombs strapped to their own bodies, guns firing wildly— anything, as long as it will bring that one final relief.

I thought I knew Kylo like the back of my hand, but I never suspected that his mind is already in that place after two years of staring at walls and radar screens.

“We’re dead here anyway,” he argues. “We’re sitting ducks. At least we can go down doing something _useful.”_

“I _killed_ her.” The words burst from me like a pent-up storm making landfall at long last. “I killed her so I could live. You can’t ask me to throw that away!”

Kylo’s dark eyes blaze. He raises his voice to match mine. “Who’s asking? We never asked to be left out in the cold because High Command doesn’t care about two measly sentries, but that’s what’s happening now. You had no choice the moment the Sisters of the Apocalypse brought you into their fold. This war took away all of our options a long time ago. So maybe you should stop living for _her,_ whoever she was, and start living for _yourself.”_

“Er, excuse me.”

Kylo and I blink. We hadn’t even noticed Ben sidling up to us.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” he says delicately, “but the you two are getting quite loud, and it might attract the… Children.”

“Zombies,” snarls Kylo. “Not the Children of Lazarus. None of those fancy Core names here. They’re _zombies.”_

“It’s bad luck to say that word, with us so deep in their territory,” Ben declares. “It might… call them. Our parents told us that. Don’t you remember?”

A muscle ticks along Kylo’s jaw. I have to diffuse the tension before the first punch can be thrown. Willing myself to calm down, I turn to Ben with a small smile.

“You’re in the Western Reaches now,” I say. “We like to live a little dangerously.”

Ben’s chuckle is somewhat forced— I guess my lame attempt at humor wasn’t enough to take his mind off all the undead out here just waiting to eat him— but at least Kylo’s shoulders relax.

I give him a pointed look. “We’ll talk about this in the morning. In the meantime, we’ll set up camp and keep trying to contact the cities with Ben’s communicator. All right?”

Kylo nods. His expression is as coolly detached as ever, but I can tell from the paleness of his face that he was shaken by our fight as well. Our quarrels in the past have always been about stuff like whose turn it was to do the laundry or whether there was too much or too little salt on the potatoes. Mundane, petty things, quick to blow over, started mainly out of boredom. Today marks the first time I’ve ever wanted to hurt him, the first time he’s ever picked at my old wounds.

I realize now that we have the potential to cause each other pain. When did _that_ happen?

We hurry to prepare dinner and makeshift beds under a progressively darkening sky. Lighting a fire in zombie land would be the height of folly, so we’ll have to make do with beef jerky and cold beans. I bring my knife down on the lid of the cans while Ben shakes out the blankets and Kylo inspects the perimeter. Suddenly, Ben turns to me as if he’s just remembered something.

“One of your watchtowers is really on a volcano?” he asks.

“Dormant,” Kylo and I reply at the same time.

*

After dinner, Kylo and I play roshambo to determine who takes first watch. The game goes like this: you and the other player simultaneously make one of three shapes with your hand. Blast radius in the form of an open palm beats gun, which is made with the index finger pointed forward and the thumb sticking up; gun beats zombie, wrist curved down, index and middle finger wiggling to resemble a pair of shambling legs; and zombie beats blast radius, because the dead came back to life after nuclear winter two hundred years ago.

I lose.

He smirks. “I can stay up with you, if you like.”

“Then what would be the point of keeping watch in shifts?” I sniff haughtily. “Go to sleep, you big lug.”

Kylo slings one possessive arm around my waist, slanting his mouth over mine in a swift, hard kiss that I am too startled to do anything but accept. Then he walks away and I am blinking at his back, wondering at this sudden burst of… affection? He had never really been one for kisses out of the blue.

Of course, that was back when there were only two of us. But, in that case, shouldn’t it be the other way around, shouldn’t an intensely private man such as himself become even more withdrawn—

My gaze flickers to Ben. His expression is faintly amused. And I remember the possessiveness with which Kylo had grabbed me just a few moments ago.

Kylo roughly shoulders past Ben on the way to the spread-out sleeping bags. The vague grin on Ben’s face only grows wider and he tips a wink in my direction.

I narrow my eyes. It is the least of our concerns at the moment, but… something happened. Something that I think has to do with me.

And I’m determined to get to the bottom of it.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another week, another update day missed, this time because I decided to add a whole bunch of scenes to the original draft 🥴 Here's 7385 words of angst and sexual tension and zombie mayhem. I guess that's just my life now.

**_21 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

**_Midnight_ **

Ben wakes up when there’s about an hour left to go on my shift. I’m supposed to be keeping watch over the forests and the slopes that surround us, but my eyes stray to him as he extricates himself from his sleeping bag and walks over to me. He could be Kylo in the moonlight, the shadows concealing a tidier haircut and an unscarred cheek.

He sits beside me, the two of us cross-legged on the rocky ground of the hill. He yawns, scrutinizing me through a fog of half-remembered dreams.

“You really look like her.” The words rush out from him, drowsy and obviously unplanned, judging from the way he gives a start, surprised by his own self. “I mean, of course you do, but it’s just…” His hand moves through the night air in a vague gesture. “It’s uncanny. Although I’ll grant that the hair is different.”

“Those are the same thoughts that I have about you and Kylo,” I tell him.

“Oh?” Ben cocks his head. There is a gleam in his eyes that I’m not sure I like. That I’m not sure if it’s dangerous or not. It’s somewhat sly. “What _other_ thoughts do you have about us Solo boys, Miss Rey?”

I blink, confused. I feel like we’ve been dancing and there’s a step that I’ve missed.

“You’re not a Solo.” Kylo’s acerbic tone cuts through the darkness from where he’s bunched up in his sleeping bag a few feet away. “You said so yourself, Captain Organa.”

Ben is unfazed. “It was easier to climb rank in the Alderaanian military if I took Mom’s last name,” he tells Kylo. “If I hadn’t done that, I would never have been appointed special tactics liaison to Jakku and the three of us wouldn’t be here right now.”

“Here camping on some godforsaken hill in the middle of zombie territory with a journey through even more zombie territory ahead of us?” Kylo sniped. “Then I suppose that you are correct. The nepotism really did us a favor.”

I catch the curl of Ben’s lip, bathed in a patch of moonlight. I decide to redirect the flow of the conversation before someone throws the first punch.

“Why was it easier to climb rank if you took your mother’s surname?” I ask Ben.

“It’s a very old and respected Alderaanian bloodline, is House Organa,” Ben replies with a hint of self-deprecation. “Mom’s parents were diplomats. She accompanied them to some fancy event in Chandrila and she met our dad there when she snuck out for a bit of fun. He was something of a scoundrel, so dear old gramps and granny weren’t too pleased. A few months later, Mom ran away from the fancy estate and boarded a ship back to Chandrila. To marry Dad and have—” Ben pauses, glancing at the figure huddled tense and unmoving not so far away—“well, one of us.”

“She would have been safer if she’d stayed in Alderaan,” I opine.

“She was in love. All logic right out the window,” Ben says cheerfully. “And, besides, if she hadn’t left to be with Dad, _you_ would never have met Kylo and myself. What a tragedy that would have been.” I roll my eyes while biting back a grin, and Ben seems to take that as some form of encouragement. He leans forward until he’s almost in my space, and the breath catches in my lungs. “The _real_ tragedy, though, Rey,” he continues in a languid drawl, “is that you had to meet my crummy brother first. Or maybe it’s a tragedy only for me?” He lays a hand over his heart.

And once more I feel like I’ve lost the plot. I don’t understand what he’s saying. It’s words that I know in a language that I don’t.

Before I can ask Ben what he means, Kylo suddenly springs to his feet and stomps over to us. From where I’m sitting on the ground, I have to crane my neck to catch a glimpse of his thunderous expression.

“Enough. Rey. I’m taking my shift early.” Kylo’s tone is filled with heat, and it only adds to my confusion. “Go to sleep.”

I look at Ben and he, too, is peering up at Kylo. But his lush mouth is curved into what can only be termed a shit-eating grin and the gleam in his eyes is back, and this time it’s— _enterprising._

I have too much going on in my life to have the time or the energy to worry about whatever this is. I bid Kylo and Ben good night and head to my own sleeping bag. I have some faint idea of eavesdropping on whatever conversation will ensue, but I must be even more tired than I realized— I fall asleep right away.

*

Marie and I are stuffing our faces with mango tarts. At first I’m inclined to think I’m dreaming about something that never happened, because here we are seven years old and I don’t remember ever being so young or so carefree. But, no, it has to be a memory, because Marie like this is familiar— sticky mouth, round cheeks, dark eyes twinkling mischievously in the afternoon light, so different from the usually pensive Rose but still the same, small form silhouetted against the windows in such a way that she seems ethereal, like all my other ghosts. It’s a memory because I know that any moment now Sister Maz is going to march into the kitchen and order us to run laps for the crime of hogging that evening’s desserts.

“Sister Alicka used too much sugar,” Marie declares, lapping at the amber filling that’s oozed down her thumb.

Back then, I said something else, something flippant, but the dream-me deviates from the script of the past. “In eight years’ time I’m going to put a bullet through your head,” I tell her in my childhood voice, my childhood lisp.

Marie nods, brushing crumbs of flaky pastry from her shirtfront. “I know,” she says sadly. “That’s okay. I don’t want it to be anyone else but you.”

I bite into another tart and make a face, the cloying sweetness thickening my tongue. “I won’t think about this moment when I pull the trigger. I won’t think about anything else but surviving.”

“That’s also okay.” Marie smiles like she understands. “This war means being able to let go.”

The door flies open. I brace myself for Sister Maz’s rage, but before I can catch a glimpse of the familiar black habit, Marie reaches out to grip my hand.

“Rey,” she says, urgent and earnest, “you have to wake up now.”

“I can’t lose you again.” My throat is choked, not with Sister Alicka’s overly generous amounts of sugar, but with the tears I never shed at Marie’s funeral. “Let’s just stay like this.”

Marie sighs. “What did I tell you about letting go? Listen to me. I’m waiting for you.” The world is starting to unravel but her face is all I see, her hand clasped around mine is all I feel. “You’re going to be brave, though. Again and again and again. You’re going to make me wait a long time. You’re going to _wake up.”_

I open my eyes to the sound of gunfire.

*

I scramble to haul myself upright, hurriedly wiping off the wetness from my cheeks with my bare palm. I’ve probably tracked dirt all over my face, but there are more important things to worry about now. Kylo and Ben are shooting at a group of zombies shambling up the hill— well, Kylo’s shooting, crouched behind a boulder with the machine gun, shells trickling to the ground like rain; Ben’s just sort of firing wildly, squeezing his eyes shut every time the pistol goes off. No wonder he needed a bodyguard in the first place.

Finally, Kylo has had enough. “Give me that,” he snaps at his lookalike. “You’re just wasting ammo. Start packing. And rev up the escape pod.”

Looking unabashedly relieved, Ben hands the gun to Kylo, who tosses it to me. The zombies aren’t that far off, but they’re moving slower than usual, battling gravity. I only have to squint a little to get them in my sights. _Save your bullets,_ Sister Maz chants in my ear. _Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes._

But zombie sclerae aren’t white; they’re pearly and yellowish, stained with a multitude of blood-red veins, set in gray faces, slanting off on top of rotting noses and gaping mouths. Kylo and I fire and they fall like clockwork, tumbling down the hill. There aren’t that many of them; these are stragglers, separated from the herd.

I pick off the last one just as I hear the pod’s engine roar to life. “We have to move,” I tell Kylo. “We made too much noise. Their friends are probably already on the way.”

“Remind me again why High Command didn’t see fit to equip the watchtowers with silencers,” Kylo mumbles.

“Budget constraints?” I shrug. “Was Ben able to make contact with that communicator of his?”

“No. Nothing,” Kylo replies darkly. “We’re on our own.”

“Incoming!” Ben cries from his place at the open cockpit.

Kylo and I whirl around. A fresh wave of zombies is crawling up the hill.

“To think that I could be lounging in the tower room with a cup of tea right now,” Kylo mutters under his breath, reloading his weapon.

Instead of following suit, I reach for one of the grenades strapped to his hip. “Give me your communicator!” I yell to Ben, removing the safety clip.

“What for?” Ben shouts back.

I resist the urge to chuck the grenade in his direction. “Will. You. Just. _Do. It.”_

Ben lobs the communicator at me. I throw the grenade towards the mass of undead and manage to catch the communicator as the explosion tears up the hill.

“Mayday! Mayday!” I holler into the mouthpiece, ducking for cover while Kylo fires. “High Command, do you read me? High Command, pick up. _Please._ High Command— anyone—!”

No response. Nothing but radio silence, until the last zombie has toppled to the ground and my throat is raw from shouting.

Perhaps it’s because the dream is still fresh in my mind. Perhaps it’s because I can still feel the sting of my tears. Perhaps the stress has gotten to me at last. Whatever the reason, my chest tightens with an emotion it takes me a few beats to identify as rage. I never questioned being a soldier because it meant fighting back, taking control in some small way. But I didn’t sign up for this, to be left adrift and vulnerable the first time something went wrong. Why _didn’t_ we have silencers? Why didn’t we have our own escape pods? Why didn’t Jakku care about two sentries in a tower keeping watch over their goddamn sea?

 _Screw_ protocol.

Kylo gives me a hard look. “Rey, are you… _crying?”_

I almost laugh, he sounds so terrified. “Allergies,” I say. I sniff for emphasis. “I guess we’re off to the beach.”

*

 _No good,_ I think wildly, gripping the edge of the pod’s wing so hard that all color has been leeched from my knuckles. _This is no good._ I’m pressed flat on my stomach, as is Kylo on the other wing, while between us Ben tentatively pushes buttons in the cockpit like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And he really doesn’t. The pod lurches forward awkwardly, tilting to the left because Kylo is heavier than I am. We’re moving painfully slow, but I’m already airsick, tree trunks and brambles and rocks crawling past me. I try to focus on the horizon, hoping for the strip of black that hints at the shoreline. My palms dig into the wing in a futile attempt to bring Burke’s Trailing closer.

We coast over another hill, and Ben’s barely managed to bring the pod to level again when I see them. Zombies. A small group up ahead, shuffling in our general direction.

“Shit!” Kylo yells. “Higher! Go higher!”

I don’t know if Ben can hear him through the glass, but the pod suddenly rears up— only to dip back down again because it’s carrying too much weight. We plow through the zombies. I hang on for dear life, assailed by the odor of decomposing flesh, the tang of old blood. Kylo bangs on the glass hatch, shouting at Ben to go faster. A gray hand tugs at my foot, I kick it away. A mangled face appears at my side; I smash my elbow into it, careful to avoid the teeth. Holding on to the wing with one hand, I reach for the knife in my boot right before the wing crashes into another zombie, which lands on top of me in a whirl of rotting limbs and tattered rags. I twist away from its gnashing teeth, gritting my own as I push the knife into its neck. Blood descends upon me like rain. Old blood, sluggish and slow, irradiated to be a pantomime of life. I throw the limp body off, almost sacrificing my grip on the wing as I wrestle the knife hilt away from the corpse’s jugular. I can’t afford to lose what limited weapons we have.

And, suddenly, just like that, we are clear, with an extra burst of speed that implies Ben’s finally discovered the escape pod’s boosters. The zombies fall away as quickly as they appeared. Wind whips at my face, flinging strands of hair into my eyes, my mouth. We break through a final stretch of withered trees and the beach unfolds before us, a blur of dark sand and darker water. I hear Kylo rap on the glass hatch, the signal to stop, and Ben—

— _slams_ on the brakes.

What. An. _Idiot._

I gasp as the momentum hurls me forward. One second I’m on the wing and the next I’m rolling along the sand, wincing while the coarse particles scrape my cheeks. I come to a stop flat on my back, blinking at an empty sky. My adrenaline ebbs, ushering in a moment of startling clarity. _We made it,_ I realize in wonder, the breath knocked out of my lungs.

I’ve survived my first actual skirmish.

I always thought I was the sort of person who’d freeze during situations like that, but it had been so easy. No worries or misgivings. Just pure instinct. Just my body knowing what to do. For the first time, I find myself believing that anything’s possible, that I actually have a chance. Under this sky that goes on forever, the sound of the waves humming in my ears, the smell of salt in my nose, I believe that I will live to see the end of the war.

Kylo’s landed a few feet away from me. We pick ourselves up, rubbing our sore spots and glaring at the pod, in Ben’s general direction.

“Are you okay?” Kylo asks me.

I almost say no, because although I hear the words, my dazed mind translates them as, _“Were you bitten?”_ That’s what _“Are you okay?”_ means in Jakku.

“I’m fine.” I peer at him. “You?”

“Never better,” he drawls sarcastically. His gaze darts to Ben, who is ejecting from the pod looking pale and relieved. “Where the fuck did you learn to fly?” Kylo snarls at him.

Ben offers us a rueful grin. “Boarding school.”

*

There are no zombies in this corner of the beach. We consult the digital map again and Kylo calculates that if we travel nonstop over the water it’ll take a couple of days and a half to round up to the caves leading into Hiila Basin.

“That does seem to be the quickest route,” Ben concedes, biting his lip. He obviously wishes we can get there sooner; Kira’ time is running out. No matter how good a fighter you are, every hour spent in the Valley of the Dead drastically reduces your life expectancy.

“I packed rope,” I announce. The nuns had emphasized the importance of always having at least a couple lengths of rope, and now I can see a use for it. “We just need to find some wood.”

“What for?” Kylo asks.

“We’re making a raft, and that’s final.” I cross my arms stubbornly. “I’m not riding on the wing again. Not with this jokester at the wheel.”

Ben looks hurt, but Kylo gazes at me in admiration. “A raft,” he repeats. “That’s… that’s actually a good idea.”

I roll my eyes at him. “You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

He doesn’t smile, because Kylo almost never smiles, but his eyes are warm and he reaches out to ruffle my windswept hair in a rare gesture of affection. I kick sand at him; he pretends to duck for cover. Yesterday’s argument lies forgotten and my chest tightens with faint, fragile hope. As long as Kylo and I have each other, we’re going to be okay.

*

What a strange picture the three of us must make, an Alderaanian officer in uniform and two Jakku soldiers in white shirts and fatigue pants— one of whom looks _exactly_ like said officer— hauling planks and driftwood from the water and branches from the forest onto the shore, lashing them together with rope. The sun is high overhead, beating down our backs in relentless curtains of shimmering heat. After a while, I tie the last knot with aching fingers, almost blinded by the sweat dripping from my brow. Ben is red-faced and wheezing, on the brink of collapse.

“All right, I’ve had it,” he declares.

And he takes off his military coat, as well as the long-sleeved shirt underneath.

And I—

Well, it’s not like it’s something I haven’t seen before. Their hairstyles are different, their expressions are different, and Ben doesn’t have the scar on his cheek— but, from the neck down, he looks _exactly_ like Kylo.

Pale, easily flushed, mole-sprinkled skin stretched over vast planes and slopes of solid muscle. Broad shoulders, defined biceps, chest so wide that my mouth waters. A taut, toned stomach and lean hips.

My mind struggles to reconcile the fact that someone so incompetent is also so _attractive._ And that this same someone is in possession of a body that I’ve mapped out with my hands and my mouth, over and over and over again.

It’s only when Ben quirks an eyebrow at me that I realize that I’m full-on staring. “Something I can help you with, Rey?”

Oh, fuck.

I’ve never looked away from anyone so fast.

My gaze collides with Kylo’s, who then looks away from _me._ A dark frown on his face.

Ben just grins at the two of us, tits out for all the zombies to see.

I shake my head to clear it and focus on the ropes, on making sure that each knot is secure. After a while, when the horrid awkwardness of _that_ moment has faded, I straighten out the crick in my back as I take a good look at my surroundings for the first time. From my tower the ocean had seemed pure black, but up close, it’s a dull rainbow: murky brown in the shallows, dark blue farther away, dotted with oil slicks the color of coal. The tide laps at my boots and a panorama of sky and water stretches out before me. Endless. I’d often pictured visiting the beach, but I never expected it to make me feel so small.

“Ugly, isn’t it?” Kylo’s voice jars my reverie. He speaks with a stiff sort of… _determination._ Like he’s determined to put me gawking at his shirtless lookalike behind us. I am embarrassed, but also grateful.

“It’s not _that_ bad,” I protest without rancor.

I refuse to imagine what this beach would have looked like before nuclear winter. The only thing worse than what could have been is what once was.

The raft is a shoddy assemblage of uneven wood pieces and abaca rope, but it’s buoyant, and that’s what matters. After a quick, rather sandy lunch, Ben climbs into the escape pod and carefully steers it over the shallows, and Kylo and I tie the raft to its tail using the last of the rope. Ankle-deep in the water, we survey our handiwork.

“What do you think?” Kylo asks.

I purse my lips. “I think that you should be the one to fly the escape pod.”

“And leave you with my worser half?” Kylo smirks. “You’d throw him overboard.”

“Let’s take turns,” I say.

“Throwing him overboard?”

 _“No.”_ I snort. “One at the wheel, one sleeping, one keeping watch. That way, no one gets sunburned, and everyone can rest.”

Kylo nods. “Yeah, all right. I’ll radio him about it.” Ben had given Kylo his communicator so that we could interface with the A.I.

I’m still studying our new mode of transportation. The sleek silver craft with its emerald-green glass accents, the crude brown raft. “If this isn’t an allegory for Alderaan-Jakku relations, I don’t know what is,” I comment wryly.

When Kylo and I clamber onto the raft, it sinks slightly, splashing us with saltwater. I sigh. “You shouldn’t have had that last pack of beef jerky, Kylo.”

“Don’t make me throw _you_ overboard,” Kylo retorts, reaching over to pinch my ass. I bite back a squeal, and he clicks on the communicator and gives Ben the signal to go ahead. The pod jerks forward; I would have fallen off if Kylo’s hand hadn’t shot out at the last possible moment to steady me by the waist. My heart’s still racing even when Ben manages to set a gentler pace.

 _“Gradually_ push the throttle,” Kylo barks into the mouthpiece. “Not all the way at once!”

 ** _“Sorry,”_** Ben squeaks, voice tinny with static.

This is going to be a long, _long_ trip.

*

The afternoon passes by so slowly it’s excruciating. Sprawled on his back next to me, Kylo dozes, hands crossed behind his head, face tilted to the sun. I sit with my legs stretched out, staring at the horizon. When that gets boring, I switch my attention to the shore. Once the first few zombies started showing up, Ben had maneuvered us into the deeper portion of the water so that they’d drown before they could reach us. But we’re staying under the radar so far; at our snail’s pace, the engine is almost silent, too low for the shuffling bodies on the beach to hear.

I watch them now, the undead. They are distant, shambling figures, but if I got close enough, would I recognize any of them? An orphan, a nun, a soldier I trained with back in Niima City? I squint at two figures near the water, travelling in a crooked line parallel to us. Maybe I’m looking at my parents now and I don’t even know it.

Everyone comes back from the dead. This is a fact of life. Scientists posit that the Black Death toxin left its mark in the air we breathe, and this, coupled with the gamma radiation that’s seeped into the bones of the earth, does strange things to our cells, forcing circulatory resurrection. Black Death had been the weapon of choice before nuclear war, and for a short time after. The atom bombs lit up the globe. When humanity finally emerged from the fallout shelters and began to rebuild, they found out that their dead no longer stayed dead. In the ensuing chaos, the fragile truce between the various groups of what was left of civilization shattered. It took a few months for someone to realize that Black Death catalyzed the Turn, and the toxin— from that moment unofficially referred to as Chemical Z— was locked away somewhere. What few nations were left standing reverted to old-fashioned warfare— naval battles, trenches, explosives, dogfights— as they each struggled to claim more territories, more resources, more chance of living space that undeath had not touched. Several years of stalemates, invasions, and failed negotiations, while in the background the zombies kept coming.

And then the Core nations played their ace card. From their towering cities rose the first two destroyers— _Golgotha_ and _Absalom,_ deployed to Malian and Ponemah, respectively. They caused massive destruction, but not as much as the atom bombs did, only enough to force a surrender. But Malian and Ponemah didn’t surrender. They built their own destroyers, and other countries followed suit, including Ogem. Allied with Alderaan, Coruscant, Corellia, and formerly Chandrila since time immemorial, Jakku found itself besieged by hostile states from all sides. If not for the Core’s help, we’d have been wiped out long ago.

Here is my secret: a treacherous part of me wishes that Jakku had just crumbled under the air raids or become completely overrun with undead, even if that means I would never have been born. This is not the history that I want. Sometimes I think that I’d prefer not being alive now compared to having to go through the rest of my life like this. Walking in the footsteps of the zombies. Living in the shadow of the destroyers.

*

The harsh papery blue of the sky gives way to softer shades of violet and gold as the sun begins its slow descent, sinking into the ocean in a haze of red. It’s an old sun and its light is dull, but still it burns my eyes and I have to look somewhere else, off into cold slopes of saltwater and shifting pools of shadow.

Kira told me once, in a rare moment of openness, that she hates six o’clock in the evening because it is the loneliest hour, and I can understand that now, now that she is so far away from me. The air heavy with dusk, a niggling hollow sensation at the back of your head as the day disappears, the sky like a bruise— six in the evening feels like a requiem on your skin. It is a time for ghosts. And it’s even worse out here in the open, damp wood beneath me, dark waves all around, no tower of glass and metal to shield me from nightfall and the world.

It’s six in the evening and I am remembering other sunsets, I am remembering the sound of Kira’s footsteps throughout the orphanage as she chased me up the stairs. We were kids, all of us, playing… I think it was hide-and-seek, or maybe tag. Yes, tag, our version of tag, and everyone else was nowhere to be found and it felt like I was all alone within monastery walls with the girl who is me, who is not me.

 _“Bang,”_ _Kira had_ said when she caught me, pressing her fingers to my temple, a makeshift gun. _“Bang, Rey, you’re dead.”_

And the much younger me glimpsed fading rays of red and gold through the open windows, blazing panels of light cut into stone, and suddenly I was pushing Kira away with a strange, glorious fury, screaming that, no, I wasn’t dead, I wasn’t going to zombify, not like this, not at sunset, not by that hand of hers that is mine as well—

I cringe, punching the thing nearest to me, which happens to be Kylo’s shoulder. Startled, he jerks up into a sitting position. The shift in weight causes water to slosh over the edges of the raft and onto our boots.

“What was _that_ for?” he demands.

“Your turn to pilot,” I improvise, because we’re not quite there yet, at the point where I can tell him little things about my past without feeling like I’m betraying it by giving up its secrets to someone who wasn’t there when it happened. Neither can he know how deep down the memories drag me, how I have to move, to hurt, to bring myself back to the surface again.

Kylo mutters instructions into the communicator, and Ben coaxes the escape pod to a halt. I tug at the rope to pull the raft closer to the pod, wet, salt-crusted abaca fibers digging into my palms, rubbing them raw. I smirk in amusement as Kylo and Ben teeter past each other, arms held out for balance, trying not to fall into the water in the most awkward two-step in history. I offer Ben my hand as he comes aboard the raft, folding his legs under him, every tiny motion splashing the sea on my thigh. And then the engine hums and we’re off once more, plowing through the folds of night, the silence.

But I am quickly learning that silence doesn’t last long when Ben’s around. “I’m so tired,” he groans, stretching. He’d put his military tunic back on. “Can’t take all this excitement in my old age.”

“You and Kylo are the same age,” I say.

“Exactly.” He winks. “Bet you wear him out.”

The most _ferocious_ blush that I’ve ever experienced rises to my cheeks. “Just get some rest,” I snap.

“Don’t mind if I do.” Ben lies down gingerly, careful not to upset the raft. I figure that’s the end of our conversation, until he murmurs in a slow and sleepy voice, “I haven’t thanked you yet, by the way. For doing this. For coming with me. I know it wasn’t an easy decision to abandon your post.”

“I’m not exactly thrilled about it,” I remark, “but if I have to be court-martialed, it might as well be for doing the right thing.”

“You won’t be court-martialed, Rey,” Ben insists. “I’ll see to that. The Core will see to that. So there. There’s your added incentive to keep me alive.”

“Because I was really running out of reasons,” I deadpan.

Ben chuckles softly, and I’m still amazed by this, by how easily laughter comes when I’m with him. Humor— the warm, open, non-sarcastic kind— is often in short supply with Kylo and me, but talking to Ben is like talking to the friends I once had at Our Lady of Mercy, in the time when I still lived within the Babylon Wall and jokes were not yet rationed. He’s just that kind of person, the one who easily surrenders the aspects of himself that Kylo makes other people earn.

“You must really miss Kira,” I find myself saying.

Ben hesitates. “And you don’t?”

I’m not quite sure how to respond to that. Back at the monastery, Kira and I hadn’t really been what you’d call friends, and I think that we will never be. There is too much resentment there. I resent her for being the better version of myself and she resents me for being the real version of us.

A lot of people’d had a similarly conflicted relationship with their clones. Finn and Dayo. Poe and Isa. Rose and Marie had been the exception, because Rose had treated Marie like a sister. Perhaps as a substitute for her older sister, Paige, who had died within a year of being deployed to the front lines.

“I don’t know if I miss Kira,” I finally tell Ben. “But here I am, about to walk into the Valley of the Dead for her. I think that has to count for something.” A thought occurs to me. “Does she know? That I’m…”

He nods. “When Kylo and I were going through the tunnels, I managed to make contact with her long enough to fill her in. She knows. She’s waiting for you.”

I watch the sunset burn upon the water. I wonder if Ben knows what happened— what Kira and I did that night when we were both sixteen. I wonder if she told him.

“To answer your question, yes, I miss her.” Ben drags a hand through his windswept dark hair. “I miss her a lot and I’m worried out of my mind, but I don’t show it because she hates it when I make a fuss. We fight all the time, and I keep thinking—” He sighs. “I keep thinking, what if she doesn’t make it? What I wouldn’t do to give her one more fight.”

His voice is soft, not only with exhaustion, but also with tenderness, and I can’t help feeling embarrassed. I’m not used to people who wear their hearts on their sleeves.

Ben must sense my awkwardness and correctly guess the reason behind it, because this is what happens next: He tells me, “It’s okay, you know,” in a gentle voice, and I blink at him in the gloom and ask, “What is?”

“Letting people in,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Sometimes it’s easier to allow it to happen.”

When he’s fallen asleep, I tilt my face up to the night sky. Stars rain down their silver light, and I feel incredibly lonely all of a sudden. I click on the scarab beetle communicator and mumble Kylo’s name into its mouthpiece.

 ** _“Rey?”_** His static-tinged voice intertwines with the sound of the waves. “ ** _Everything all right?”_**

“I want…” The words spring out unbidden, and they die in my throat because there is no sane way to complete the sentence. I want so many things.

My abrupt silence makes Kylo suspicious. **_“You haven’t_ _really_ _thrown him overboard, have you?”_**

“He screamed as he drowned.”

**_“Tough luck for him, Turning in water.”_ **

“Not my problem.”

There’s an intake of breath on the other end of the line which I recognize as Kylo’s back-to-business sigh. **_“Seriously, though, wake him up in four hours, okay? You need to rest.”_**

“I’m wired.”

**_“You’ll crash later. Believe me. I was high on adrenaline going through those tunnels. It felt good to just be somewhere else. We walked an entire day and night, and I thought I could walk nonstop until we reached the Plains. The minute Ben insisted on a quick break, though, I was out like a light.”_ **

_Tell me about the Badlands,_ I almost say. _Tell me who you carried the bullet for. Or the axe, or the knife…_

But my courage fails me, so instead I bid Kylo good night and sign off. No use wasting the battery packs.

This, Ben Organa from Alderaan, is another thing that you will never understand. It’s not letting people in that’s the problem.

It’s letting them go.

* * *

**_22 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

It’s a slow and tiresome journey, drifting along the coast. By noon of the second day, our throats are parched, our lips chapped from saltwater spray and heat. The rocking motion of the breeze-blown sea, which at first had been so soothing, now makes me vaguely nauseous. I long for shade and cooked food and a dry bed that stays still.

But there are nice moments. Rendered nice by virtue of them taking place somewhere that’s not the tower. Like now.

Ben’s just taken his shift at the wheel of the escape pod, so it’s Kylo and me on the raft. We’re lying flat on our backs, the tips of my hair trailing into the sea and his fingers tracing idle circles on my stomach. His eyes are shielded from the sun by his free hand, while mine are simply screwed shut. The warmth of day pours honey-slow into my veins.

“I haven’t felt like this in ages,” says Kylo, his voice as lazy as his movements.

“Like what?”

“Peaceful. You know. Just sort of… all content and shit.”

“Mmhmm.” I tip my head further back, letting sunlight kiss its way down my throat and pool into the hollow of my collarbones. “I think you’re happy.”

He scoffs. “Yeah, right.”

“No point in denying it. You were irreparably dorky from the moment I met you.”

“Whatever.”

Here is what I don’t tell Kylo: I’m happy, too. Despite the beginnings of a sunburn and the thought of hard days ahead, the happiness flows out, lifting my heart and the corners of my mouth. I keep it to myself because I want to treasure it as much as it terrifies me. I’m scared of the feeling because it doesn’t last forever. That’s the true price of this war.

All too soon the heat lifts from my eyelids, replaced by a cold sensation washing over my head like ice water. I can tell that the sky has darkened even before I open my eyes. Kylo and I prop ourselves up, our gazes fixed on a spot on the horizon where a huge pile of black clouds has blossomed.

“Storm,” Kylo says without preamble into the communicator’s mouthpiece. “Can you find us some cover?”

 ** _“Affirmative,”_** Ben replies. **_“There’s a cove just up ahead.”_**

I look back at the coastline, superimposing it in my mind over images of maps and charts, trying to remember what I learned from geography class at the monastery. I inhale sharply once the realization dawns.

“We can’t go in there,” I tell Kylo. “That’s Reestkii.”

He pales, but glances at the horizon again, at the clouds that are now rolling toward us. “We have no choice, Rey.”

I’d stamp my foot if I weren’t currently sitting on a raft floating on the ocean. “Kylo, it’s _Reestkii,”_ I repeat. “I mean, what is this, a tour of the places we’ve been explicitly taught to avoid?”

“Got a better idea?” he snaps.

The wind’s started to pick up, tossing our hair into our eyes. The waves underneath us are growing more violent with every passing second. I grit my teeth because I know Kylo’s right. I don’t like our chances of survival in the Bay of Sorrows, but I like them even less out here on open sea.

Jakku’s storms are the stuff of legend. Fierce and unrelenting, lasting anywhere from a few hours to a few days. In the smaller towns, they say that each storm is the Breath of R’iia, a vengeful weather goddess.

“Take us to the cove,” Kylo instructs Ben. “We have… maybe less than five minutes before the storm hits. Make it quick.”

**_“Hang on tight, then.”_ **

Stirred by the approaching storm, great walls of foam and saltwater come crashing down all around us as we speed over the ocean. Flat on my stomach alongside Kylo, I grip the edges of the raft so tightly that the wood grain burns my palms. I’m drenched to the bone by the time I catch sight of the little islands that mark the entrance to Reestkii, triangular silhouettes against a black sky, the wind a high and furious whistle in my ears.

“Ah, fuck,” breathes Kylo.

I turn just in time to see a huge wave bearing down upon us. I brace myself, and the world is submerged in water and darkness and silence.

*

“I really think that you and I are going to make it, you know,” Rose told me one afternoon during a free period that we’d decided to spend in the archive room. This was a few months after I killed Marie, and golden light and dust motes were streaming through her lookalike’s jet-black hair. “Not like these idiots.” She casts a derisive glance over at Finn and Poe, who are snickering as they carve penises on one of the tables with a pocketknife.

“How can you be so sure that we’re going to make it?” I ask.

“Just a feeling.” Rose shrugs. “Yesterday in hand-to-hand training you reared up and spat at the instructor who had you pinned, and he was startled enough to let you go. I saw that and I thought to myself, ‘There’s someone who wants to live.’” She takes my hand and she smiles, sad and hopeful and fifteen years old. “You and I are going to make it, Rey,” she repeats, like it’s a promise and a wish and a prayer and a charm for good luck all at once. “We will live to see the end of this war. We will save all that we love. We will win.”

It seems like a strange thing to remember, now.

*

The wave carries us all the way to shore. Just before it breaks, Kylo loses his grip, and I have to sling my body across the raft so he can grab hold of my foot. I’m supporting both our weights, an impossible task; once the sea spits us out onto the beach, my fingers slip and we are hurled through the air.

I land badly. Hard, on my left shoulder. Kylo chokes out a warning as the escape pod skids over the sand, in my direction. I manage to roll away before I am crushed, and I hear something snap, but the sound is drowned out by rain and thunder as the storm makes landfall.

Kylo helps me to my feet as Ben scrambles out of the escape pod. The three of us huddle at the nearest shelter, which happens to be a gigantic coral reef, dried out and hollow in the middle, forming an archway big enough for us to stand under. We shiver as the gale racks through our wet bodies, water dripping down our cheeks, trickling from our clothes.

Ben is the most distressed I’ve ever seen him. “I hate this country.”

“W-w-welcome to the club,” I say through chattering teeth. I rub my arms, but a different kind of warmth shoots up my left side, the searing white heat of pain. I cry out.

Kylo’s eyes widen. “Rey, your shoulder…”

It’s sticking out at an odd angle. This explains the snap I heard earlier. Now that the adrenaline’s worn off, the pain is debilitating.

“Is it broken?” Ben asks worriedly.

“I’ll have to take a closer look at it,” says Kylo. “But not here.” He scans the beach, and then points to a collection of huts nestled right below the cliffs.

“It might not be safe inside one of those,” Ben protests.

“At least it’ll be dry,” Kylo retorts. “Come on.”

*

Currently known as the Bay of Sorrows, Reestkii once housed a fishing village with a military garrison to watch over it, until it succumbed to the inevitable fate of all small communities beyond the Babylon Wall. Either a herd of zombies arrived, too numerous to keep in check, or the infection started with one of the villagers and spread until it couldn’t be contained. That’s the usual story. Now the place is deserted, nothing more than a tale to scare children with, a home for ghosts.

Ben raps sharply on the door of the first hut we come to. Kylo and I stare at him.

“Really?” I mutter.

The sunburned tips of Ben’s ears turn even pinker, but he manages to defend himself. “No harm in knocking. Basic courtesy.”

He opens the door and we step inside.

The hut looks as if its inhabitants left in a hurry, which they probably did. There’s wood in the fireplace and a plate of tiny deformed fish skeletons on the table, the spines bent, some two-headed. An abandoned meal, most likely picked clean by ants.

Kylo retrieves a box of matches from the mantelpiece and gets a fire going in a matter of seconds. The flames sputter weakly in the damp air that smells of decay, but we gravitate to what little warmth they offer.

“I’ll bring in our bags, shall I?” says Ben.

Kylo nods. “Good idea. And I’ll see what I can do about Rey’s shoulder.”

Once Ben’s gone, Kylo kneels at my side and carefully pulls my shirt up over my head. When I’m stripped down to my brassiere and fatigue pants, he examines the injured spot, prodding it, cautiously tugging at my left arm. His hands are slow and gentle, but each slight movement makes me yelp.

“It’s not broken,” he pronounces at last. “The joint’s just dislocated.” He bends my elbow and starts to rotate my arm and shoulder inward. His tentative gaze catches mine. “I’ll have to pop it back. Are you ready?”

“Think there’s any whiskey around here?” I try to joke, but my voice emerges shaky and faint from my knotted throat.

Kylo looks so stricken that I instantly abandon all attempt at mirth.

“It’s okay,” I tell him.

“No,” he rasps, his tone strangled. “It’s really not.”

And he _pushes,_ and brilliant sparks of pain dance before my eyes.

 _“Whatever happens,”_ Rose had told me that day in the archive room, _“we will overcome.”_


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love reading everyone's theories and speculations and horniness!!! I adore you guys with all my trashy heart!!!

**_23 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

For dinner last night we’d heated up tins of salted beef over the fire and attacked it at the table, with our forks and with ravenous gusto. Kylo had fashioned a makeshift sling for my arm from a couple of ragged old pillowcases that he found in the bedroom, and afterwards it hadn’t taken long for all three of us— Kylo, Ben, and myself— to fall asleep by the hearth, our bellies full, our bodies exhausted and warm.

It’s morning now, and I only know that it’s morning because that’s what my military-issue wristwatch tells me. The storm hasn’t let up and it’s so dark that it might as well be twilight. Rain pounds against the derelict windowpanes as a fierce gale whistles through the cracks in the walls.

I’m sitting by the window, trying to spot even the faintest glimmer of the world outside, but the heavy rain and the overcast skies render the shoreline into nothing more than one shadowy blur. At last, I give up and transfer my gaze to the rickety table where Ben is teaching Kylo how to play antichess.

Visibility is better in this direction, but not by a significant margin. We have to conserve the woodpile, so the hearth glows only with what’s left of the embers of that first fire. I look at the two men seated across from each other in the dim light and the cool air and the sounds of pounding rain and roaring wind, and I am surprised by what I feel. A certain curiosity— I do not know.

Ben had played antichess with me first. I’d turned out to be rather bad at it, since I have to force myself to unlearn old rules, but Kylo, who’d soon taken my place, is already something of an expert. Ben still beats him two out of three, though, which I find peculiar. Antichess strikes me as the kind of game that requires a very precise combination of cleverness and self-loathing in order to win, qualities which I know Kylo has in abundance, but what could Ben possibly have to hate himself for?

Perhaps there is more to Captain Organa from Alderaan than meets the eye.

“I’ve been thinking,” Kylo announces as he packs up the chess board after the last game is done, “that we should stay here for a while.”

I don’t fail to notice the way Ben’s hand stills over an overturned pawn. But he remains silent, giving Kylo the opportunity to explain himself.

“Even if the storm passes in the next few hours, Rey’s shoulder needs time to heal,” says Kylo. “Obviously, we can’t afford the several weeks that’ll take, but we should at least wait until the swelling goes down. Five days, maybe?”

_Is that all right?_ are the unspoken words that hang in the air. _Can you hold on that long?_

_Can Kira?_

Ben nods, flashing me a rueful grin. “Of course. What kind of gentleman would I be if I made you fight off the Children with that shoulder?”

_As opposed to making me fight them off at all?_ I suddenly want to snap. An unfair thought, given that he hadn’t exactly pointed a gun at my head and forced me to come along on this mission, but I’m cranky at the prospect of being an invalid for the next few weeks.

Besides, our inner lives are always mean little things.

Ben brightens up, as if an idea has just occurred to him. “Have you checked the first aid kit, though? Might have a shot of Prom stashed somewhere.”

I struggle not to roll my eyes at this display of Core privilege. The Regrowth Drug is a cocktail of chemicals and stem cells that can almost instantaneously heal even the most massive injuries when injected into the affected area. Scientists say that it’s one step closer to the cure for the undeath written into everyone’s veins, although that optimism has waned as the years have dragged on. Each dose costs a small fortune. Jakku can’t even afford to hand out silencers to its sentry regiments; what more the Prometheus syringes? It only goes to show how affluent the Core is, when one of their own even dares to hope that Prom can be lying around anywhere.

Kylo shoots me what I’m beginning to peg as the Ben look— the disbelieving, raised-eyebrow, “Is he for real?” look. I shrug, and then immediately suck in a sharp breath as the motion sends a spasm of pain lancing through my shoulder.

Well, _this_ is going to be a hassle.

*

Ben volunteers to take first watch later that night, but despite my fatigue I don’t nod off right away. My balance is awry; I feel as if the floor is rocking like the ocean, and it makes me queasy.

I hear the static of the communicator and Ben’s low voice threading through the patter of the rain. I sneak a glance at him from under my flimsy blanket. He’s hunched in front of the fire, speaking quietly into the mouthpiece as the flickering light of the replenished flames laces sparks of gold into his dark hair.

“We’re going to be a little delayed,” he’s saying now, “but we’re on our way.” He hesitates, and then, “ _I’m_ on my way to you. Don’t worry.”

I realize he’s talking to Kira. And it’s amazing, the people that people become when they think no one’s looking, all that tenderness and vulnerability beneath the layers that slide right off in the privacy of your own heartbeat, the softening of the features, the hint of pleading in the eyes, even now, even in this world where undeath rains from the sky and blossoms all around us.

“What are you saying?” Ben chuckles. “Of course I’ll find you. When have I not? Remember Cloud City on the night of the Eleventh Crusade? I found you at the Temple of the Old Ones. I’ll find you now in the Valley of the Dead. That’s us. That’s who we are. Even when it’s all gone to hell. You and I find each other, always.”

I’m intruding on a private moment. Suddenly wracked by guilt, I stick my head back under the blanket and close my eyes, forcing myself to tune Ben out. I try to recall a poem or a song or anything that would overpower his words, but what comes to me is Poe singing the day the Mother fell. And it brings me no comfort, because it’s just another thing, just one of the many things that I’ll never have again.

Right at that moment, Kylo turns in his sleep, his knee nudging my side. I wonder if he’s ever had anyone else in the time before. Like me, he rarely talks about the past. We share almost everything except that, and for good reason.

Talking about it makes it real, you see. When I’m battling zombies or scanning the horizon for destroyers, I can forget that there ever was a singing Poe, or a Marie or a Rose or a Finn, or a monastery with its silent dawns and golden afternoons. They come back to me in the dark, in my dreams; I don’t need their ghosts in daylight, too. I suspect it’s the same for Kylo. No one wants to be left with memory.

And yet here I am, running straight toward my past. Running straight toward Kira. I am afraid that, when I get there, I’ll already be too late.

* * *

**_27 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

The storm is still howling against the walls of the shack four days later. We’d found some buckets and set them out on the front stoop, so at least we have the luxury of enough rainwater not only to drink and to cook with and to make tea and coffee with, but also to clean ourselves. Every day Kylo and I lock ourselves in the bedroom and he washes my hair for me and scrubs me all over, and I just close my eyes and let myself be cared for by his strong and unerringly gentle hands as rain patters against the window-glass. I treasure these rare moments of serenity. I hold them in my heart.

We’re all getting a little stir-crazy. When it comes down to it, you can only sleep so much, and you can only play so many chess games, and you can only spend so many hours checking and maintaining your weapons.

It’s tricky for me, doing everything one-handed, but I’m lucky it was my left shoulder that gave way and not my right. After a sparing course of meds from the first aid kit, the swelling has indeed gone down some, and the pain has been reduced to a constant niggling soreness. I might even be able to remove the sling in a few more days, but of course we can’t wait that long.

Ben comes waltzing out of the hut’s small pantry room shortly before it’s time to eat dinner. He’s holding two sealed, dust-flecked bottles filled with dark amber liquid, the labels too scratched and faded to be readable.

“Look what I found shoved to the very back!” His face bears that broad grin of his that seems to come so easily. “Alcohol!”

Kylo and I stare at him blankly from where we are seated, on the floor in front of the fireplace.

Ben plunks one bottle down on the table and unscrews the cap of the other, raising it to his nose and taking a sniff. He grimaces. “This,” he says, “is either whiskey or gasoline, but I suppose that we’ll find out soon enough.”

It’s not until he fills the three metal cups that we’ve been using with generous glugs from the bottle and sits down at the table and looks over at us expectantly that we realize what his plan is.

“No, thanks,” Kylo says with a snort. He jerks his head in my direction. “Rey’s a messy drunk.”

“Am not!” I protest, color rising to my cheeks.

“What a coincidence, I love mess,” Ben hums. “Come on, it’s not like there’s anything else to do, yeah?”

Kylo and I exchange tentative glances, but Ben actually has a point, although it must pain Kylo to admit that. It’s seven in the evening and we’re stuck in a hut on a desolate coastline in the middle of a ferocious weather storm. There really is nothing to do and nowhere else that we can be even if we wanted.

I do have certain misgivings. The one time that a generous soul had included vodka in the rations shipped to Kelvin Watchtower, Kylo and I had polished off the bottle in one night and I’d ended up crying for hours, overwhelmed by my memories, by the weight of everything. Then, still sobbing, I’d gone down on my knees and given him what to this day he says was the sloppiest but also somehow the hottest blowjob of his life.

I do not know if I can afford to be that vulnerable around Ben, who is essentially a stranger even if he’s the mirror image of the man who warms my bed. But I can’t deny that for the past few days I have been longing for both numbness and a feeling that’s not apprehension over the circumstances that we’re in.

I am the one who first gets to my feet and joins Ben at the table, with Kylo trailing after me reluctantly. The three of us clink our cups together and knock back our first swigs.

Swigs that the three of us also end up coughing out, our features screwed up at the bitter burn.

“So it _is_ gasoline,” Ben sighs. “Ah, well.”

He tilts his head and gulps down another generous mouthful. Kylo and I follow suit, but more cautiously.

And time passes.

We drink mostly in silence at first, the stumbling attempts at conversation initiated by Ben falling flat. But the whiskey is even more potent than I’d been prepared for, and eventually my limbs are heavy and warm and my head feels like it’s been filled with a syrupy golden light.

“You’re so cute, Rey.”

I blink at the teasing note in that deep, gravelly voice. I look at Kylo beside me, but he’s glaring straight ahead. And I realize that the person who’d just spoken was Ben, who’s studying me over the rim of his cup from across the table.

“When you’re drunk, I mean,” he clarifies. “Look at you. All flushed.”

“I’m not _that_ drunk.” I sulk, flushing some more. “And I’ll just go ahead and tell Kira you said that, shall I?”

Ben’s dark eyes crinkle at the corners. “Kira would agree with me. A compliment for you is a compliment for her, isn’t it? In the same way that I should be flattered that you’ve been happily shacking up with my brother.”

“You and I are _not_ brothers,” Kylo says stiffly. He drapes an arm over the back of my chair and there’s a part of me that all but purrs at the possessiveness as I scoot a little closer to him.

Ben— _pouts._ That’s the only way that I can describe what his mouth does. I am dimly aware that each of us are on our third cupful of whiskey. “But we grew up together,” he tells Kylo. “We are _literally_ related, in the closest possible sense. We call the same woman ‘Mom’ and the same man ‘Dad.’ What does that make me to you, then?”

“A nuisance,” Kylo deadpans.

Ben chortles, shaking his head. “You never stop being grumpy, do you?” His sly gaze slides over to me. “Rey, don’t you think that you could do with a little less doom and gloom in your life? For example, I would be more than happy to take over bathing duties.”

My jaw drops. Kylo slams his empty cup down on the table. Ben pours more whiskey into it without missing a beat.

“Keep dreaming,” Kylo snarls at his lookalike. His _brother,_ if the lookalike had anything to say about it.

“What the hell is going on?” I ask them both. Finally. Loudly. Fed up and my tongue loosened by liquor. “The two of you have been acting weird since we all met up again outside the watchtower.”

Ben looks absurdly pleased. “You’ve noticed enough about me to know when I’m acting weird, then?”

I turn my nose up at him, flustered. “You really shouldn’t be talking to me like that when you’re with my clone.”

“On the contrary, Rey—” Ben suddenly stands up, leaning over the table until his face is inches from mine. Beside me, Kylo’s gone as tense as a coiled spring, his hand gripping my shoulder tightly. “I bet that if your clone were here, she and I would be _racing_ to see who can seduce you first.”

I stop breathing. I see the gleam in his eyes and I know that he knows. I know that Kira told him. And I panic, because I don’t want him to spill it in front of Kylo, this piece of my past that is mine alone and mine alone to share—

Kylo’s fist smashes into the side of Ben’s face. I nearly jump out of my chair in shock.

Ben collapses to the floor with a groan. “You’re a fucking bastard,” he slurs.

“And you’re fucking drunk,” Kylo retorts coolly. He gets to his feet and I watch— my brain reeling from the whiskey and the bewilderment— as he stomps over to Ben and picks him up, slinging him over one shoulder in a fireman’s hold.

“Don’t toss him into the ocean,” I warn.

“God, I wish,” Kylo grumbles.

“See, you big oaf, Rey cares about me,” Ben crows as Kylo carries him to where the sleeping bags are spread out.

“It’s just that if Kylo opens the door he’ll let the rain in,” I huff.

Kylo dumps Ben on top of the latter’s sleeping bag without ceremony. Ben laughs and groans at the same time, clutching at his sore jaw, and Kylo doesn’t spare him a backwards glance as he returns to the chair beside mine.

“Your bad shoulder didn’t get jostled, did it?” he asks me with a hint of concern in his tone.

I shake my head. Kylo relaxes, and then his arm returns to where it had been draped, over the back of my seat, and he takes over the job of pouring whiskey for us. Now that all my attention is on him and he’s so close, I note that a flush has creeped up his neck, and I know that it has started from his chest, under his shirt. He’s just as inebriated as Ben is.

We knock back another round of drinks. The taste of the whiskey is much more tolerable now.

“So?” I prompt before Kylo can find it in him to discuss what Ben had said to me about Kira. “What happened before we all met up again? What’s with all the…” I gesture vaguely. Tipsily. “Macho possessiveness and weird and somehow not entirely unsexual tension?”

Kylo stares moodily into the depths of his cup. “While that idiot and I were in the tunnels, he bet me a pack of cigarettes that he could make you come quicker than I could.”

_“What?”_ I squawk.

Kylo tilts his head at me. “Don’t worry, I didn’t take him up on it. You know I don’t smoke.”

“That is— that is _hardly_ the point,” I sputter. My entire being feels like it’s been lit on _fire._

Kylo just stares at me for several long moments, and then he cracks a smile. An actual smile, crooked and all, and that’s how I know that he is even more inebriated than I’d assumed. He leans in and nuzzles at my heated cheek, and I squirm at the pleasant scrape of stubble against my skin.

“I miss Kira,” Ben moans from his sleeping bag.

“Shut up,” Kylo and I bark at him at the same time.

* * *

**_28 Thermidor_ **

**_210 ANW_ **

I honestly don’t remember much of how Kylo and I eventually made it to our sleeping bags and fell into a deep, drunken slumber. In any case, our fifth morning in the Bay of Sorrows dawns bright and clear. We emerge from the hut into what looks like some strange new world, quiet and trembling in the early light, the sand dark from the rains, the ocean still as glass. I long to walk barefoot down the beach, to feel land between my toes as I haven’t felt it since I was sixteen, but one of the first things we learned in survival training at Our Lady of Mercy was this: when you’re on the move, never take your shoes off unless absolutely necessary.

There’s a fair bit of soreness in my injured shoulder, but nothing I can’t handle. As long as I don’t make any sudden movements, I’ll be fine. This has the advantage of me relaxing while the boys do the work of packing up and carrying our bags back to the escape pod. There’s no question as to who’s going to man the cockpit until we get to Hiila Basin; I can’t cling one-handed to the raft in case of another storm.

“Let’s comb through the other huts,” suggests Kylo. “Get what supplies we can.”

Ben is aghast. “We’re not scavengers.”

“We’ll be running low on food soon,” I point out. “Another box of matches and more rope won’t be amiss, either.”

Throughout this entire discussion, none of us can quite look one another directly in the eye. Last night’s booze-addled talk hangs in the air between the three of us. It’s one small mercy that we’re not hungover.

We inspect the houses one by one, with Ben opening the doors and Kylo charging in with a pistol aimed in front of him, while I bring up the rear. The first few dwellings we come to yield nothing more than a few tins of smoked fish; one has a working tap and I fill a spare canister with water from it, which I then boil over a hurriedly made fire in the hearth. I did _not_ escape my tower to fall victim to internal parasites.

By the time we get to the seventh hut, we’re a little complacent. It looks like Reestkii has been completely deserted by the living and the undead alike. However, as soon as Ben opens the door, we hear a faint moan coming from inside.

We exchange apprehensive glances.

“Should we?” I ask.

“Best to leave it,” Ben says worriedly. “Who knows what’s in there?”

Another moan, stronger this time, definitely human.

Frowning, Kylo cocks the pistol, and then cautiously edges one foot through the doorway. “Who’s there?” he asks. “State your condition.”

The reply is a series of garbled words that I can’t make sense of, but Kylo’s eyes widen. _“Save me,”_ he translates. I realize with a jolt that the unknown person had spoken in the unique pidgin that had developed in the Goazon Badlands. Kylo’s home and his ghosts.

Before I can stop him, Kylo rushes inside, leaving Ben and myself with no choice but to follow.

The scene that greets us is gruesome, and I am certain that it will leave me shuddering with the memory of it years from now. Perhaps until the day I go to my own undeath.

Three zombies are huddled together at the back of the room, chained to the windows. A woman and two children, all dressed in bloodstained rags. The moment they see us, they reach out with their hands, groaning and grasping, clattering the manacles around their wrists. The flesh has all but rotted from their bones; they’ve arrived at that last stage when a zombie stops decomposing. The preservation instinct kicking in, they say. An undead body is still a human body, and thus it will fight to go on.

There’s an old man on the bed. He is still alive, but barely. One leg of his pants has been rolled up to expose the huge, jagged gash of a bite wound, weeping yellow pus, the skin around it a sickly greenish-gray in color.

Ben’s features go taut. “He’s infected. It won’t be long before he Turns.”

“We should spare him that fate,” I say. “Shoot him, Kylo.”

Instead, Kylo hands me the gun. “Cover me,” he instructs.

I sigh, not actually surprised. I’ve been expecting something like this since I saw the look on his face when he heard that language fall from someone else’s lips.

I keep the pistol trained on the chained zombies while Kylo moves closer to the bed. He asks the old man a question, most probably about what happened.

The man begins to speak, gesticulating wildly, his voice weak and delirious.

_“We came here in a boat,”_ Kylo translates over his words, for mine and Ben’s benefit. _“We sailed from Feressee’s Point to join my wife’s family here in Reestkii… We thought we would be safe, here in Niima Province, with High Command to watch over us…”_

“There’s a High Command in the Goazon region, too, isn’t there?” Ben asks me in a low voice.

“From what I know, they’re short-staffed and undertrained,” I mutter. “They can barely keep their zombies in check. The harbors and fishing villages here in Niima get a lot of refugees from over there.”

_“The last soldier died four years ago,”_ Kylo continues, his steady tones an eerie contrast to the old man’s piteous whines. _“The villagers and I… what little there remained of us… tried to hold back the undead… We radioed for help, but no help came… Soon it was only just us— my family and my neighbors— left… A destroyer passed by, crushing all of our boats… My wife ate puffer fish a few months back. She was so hungry… she Turned, and she bit our children…”_

The old man starts to convulse. I swing the pistol in his direction, but Kylo shakes his head.

Not yet.

_“Our neighbors left. They told me to… kill my family and come with them… but how could I? Family is family… My son bit me last night. He didn’t know what he was doing, I swear he didn’t… May God have mercy, may he take us back into his embrace…”_

The lucidity is fading from the man’s eyes. His wizened skin has taken on an ashy pallor. He rears up with a shriek, throwing his head back, mouth open to reveal cracked yellow teeth. He is gone.

I squeeze the trigger.

The shot reverberates through the dingy air. The three zombie heads swivel eagerly in the direction of its source. The man collapses onto the sheets, blood oozing from the bullet hole in his skull.

And because Kylo is a statue standing beside the bed, and shock has rendered Ben pale and limp, I step closer to the three chained zombies and I kill them, too. The mother, the daughter, the son. I look into their blank eyes and I fire, _headshot, headshot, headshot,_ and I wonder if they can wonder, if mine is the hand of judgment or the hand of mercy and if we could have had it any other way. Silly musings, useless thoughts, but if I don’t allow myself to feel the weight of remorse after the story I heard, I’d just be another kind of monster in the midst of this cursed, forsaken war.

When it’s done, the hut smells like gunpowder and dust and death. My left shoulder twinges; I fired single-handed, but the recoil caused it to jerk. By my count, there’s one bullet left in the cartridge, so, out of frustration more than anything else, I shoot at the window. Pieces of broken glass clatter to the floor at the same time that the empty magazine slides to my feet, drawing my gaze downwards.

That’s when I notice the bones peeking out from beneath the fallen bodies of the three zombies.

I gingerly nudge the corpse of the little girl aside with my boot. The trio has been sitting on a mound of skeletons, gleaming like pearls in the light coming in from the open doorway that sifts through the shadows of the little hut. I note a shattered kneecap, a fractured skull. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened here.

“His neighbors didn’t leave,” I announce. “He fed them to his wife and children.”

“He lied to us?” Ben looks so perplexed that it’s almost comical. “On his deathbed?”

“I mean, I guess that if you’ve resorted to throwing people at zombies, honesty is the farthest thing from your mind,” I mumble.

“So what if he’d confessed, anyway?” Kylo growls. “Nothing would have changed. I’d rather humans be my judge than whatever else is out there pulling the strings and laughing at us for even trying to live in this hell. Let’s clear out.” He takes the pistol from me. “We’ve made too much noise.”

Ben glances at the four bodies. “Should we bury them, do you think?”

“What for?” Kylo snaps. “Graves are only good for mourning. I hardly think there’s anyone left to mourn them.”

Part of me wants to throw my arms around him, to comfort and to be comforted, but his features are so harsh in the half-light, so angry and remote, that in the end my hand falls to my side and I remain silent and still as he walks past.

How curious, that I could be so brave in the face of danger, yet so much of a coward when it comes to the little things.

*

We are just about to start pushing the raft and the escape pod into the water when the sky darkens again. There’s a flash of fierce white-hot lightning and a rumble of thunder as loud as a cannonball, and then the rain comes pouring down in sheets once more.

By the time Kylo, Ben, and I have secured our only mode of transportation and made it back to the hut that we’d stayed in the last few days, our teeth are chattering and we’re drenched to the bone. We are all silent as Kylo gets the fire going again to take away some of the chill.

There’s no telling how long this new storm will last. Already it sounds so much worse than the first. The coastline is covered entirely in blackness.

There’s no telling if Kylo, Ben, and I will be able to endure being in such close quarters with last night hanging over our heads and with the old man and his ghoulish, withered family appearing before our eyes every time we blink.

There’s no telling if Kira will be able to survive even just one more hour in the Valley of the Dead.

Ben is paler than usual. He walks over to the table and Kylo and I regard him cautiously as he opens the second bottle of whiskey.

He holds it out to us. “Same again?” he asks.


End file.
